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CITIES OF ITALY 



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CITIES OF ITALY 



By 

Arthur Symons 



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New York: E. P. DUTTON & CO, 
London: J. M, DENT & CO. 

MDCCCCVII 



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luBRARYovCONGHESS 

I Two Copies Received 

NOV 23 190r 

•OopyrigR'. tnxry 
jfoPY B-. 



Copyright, 1907 

BY 

E. P. DUTTON & CO. 
NEW YORK 



Ube Iknfckecbocker ipress, "fflew Korl: 



TO MADAME LA COMTESSE DE LA TOUR 

As you know, and, I sometimes think, regret, 
I am one of those for whom the visible world exists, 
very actively; and, for me, cities are like people, 
with souls and temperaments of their own, and it 
has always been one of my chief pleasures to asso- 
ciate with the souls and temperaments congenial 
to me among cities. And as love, or it may be 
hate, can alone reveal soul to soul, among human 
beings, so, it seems to me, the soul of a city will 
reveal itself only to those who love, or, perhaps, 
hate it, with a far-sighted emotion. I have come 
upon many cities which have left me indifferent, 
perhaps through some accident in my way of 
approach; at any rate, they had nothing to say to 
me: Madrid, for instance, and Vienna, and St. 
Petersburg, and Berlin. It would be impossible for 
me to write about these cities: I should have 
nothing to say. But certain other cities, Rome, 
Venice, Seville, how I have loved them, what a 
delight it was to me merely to be alive, and living 
in them; and what a delight it is to me to think of 
them, to imagine myself in their streets and on their 
waters! Moscow, Naples, how I have hated them, 



iv DEDICATION 

how I have suffered in them, merely because I was 
there; and how clearly I see them still, with that 
sharp memory of discomfort ! It seems to me that 
all these cities have given up to me at least some- 
thing of their souls, like the people I have loved 
and hated on my way through the world. At least 
they have given me what they had to give me, like 
the people: my part of their souls. For we can see 
or receive, in people or things, only our own part of 
them: the vision rising in our own eyes, the passion 
rising in our own hearts. 

This is not saying that I have not tried to do 
more than write a kind of subjective diary, in which 
the city should be an excuse for my own sensations. 
I have put myself as little as possible into these 
pages; I have tried to draw confidences out of the 
stones that I have trodden but a few weeks or a 
few months, out of the faces that I have seen in 
passing, out of the days of sunshine that have after 
all warmed a stranger. I have respected the sight 
of my eyes and the judgment of my senses, and I 
have tried to evoke my cities in these pages exactly 
as they appeared to me to be in themselves. It is 
part of my constant challenge to myself, in every- 
thing I write, to be content with nothing short of 
that vraie verite which one imagines to exist some- 
where on this side of ultimate attainment. It is 
so much easier to put oneself into things than to 
persuade things to give up their own secrets; and I 
like to aim at this difficult kind of truth. 



DEDICATION v 

What is truth? you will say: yes, the old question, 
which no one has ever answered. I am only ex- 
plaining my intentions. 

Arthur Symons. 

ChAteau de Chameane, 
PuY DE D6me, Atigust, 1903. 



Part of this book was provisionally published in 
1903 as the Italian section of a book of "Cities," 
which I do not intend to reissue, in its original form. 
Here I have brought together, into something more 
like unity, all that I have to say about Italy, and I 
hope later to do the same with my scattered writings, 
in "Cities" and elsewhere, on Spain. I have re- 
peated the dedication of the book in which I made 
my first attempts at the interpretation of places, 
because, though I am here limiting myself to Italy, 
my intention remains the same. 

WiTTERSHAM, Jtdy, I907. 



VII 



CONTENTS 



Rome ..... 
Venice ..... 
Naples ..... 
Florence: An Interpretation 
Ravenna 

Pisa 

Siena ..... 
Verona ..... 
Bologna .... 

Bergano and Lorenzo Lotto . 
Brescia and Romanino . 
On a Rembrandt in Milan 



PAGB 

3 

71 
IIS 
133 
175 
193 
209 
227 

239 
247 

255 
263 



IX 



ROME 



ROME 



The last sunset of the year had been stormy; the 
whole sky, as I saw it from the Pincio, blazed like 
a conflagration; fire caught the farthest roofs of 
Rome, and seemed to sear the edges and outskirts 
of the city, like a great flame coming down from 
heaven. This flame burnt with an unslackening 
ardency long after the sun had gone down below 
the horizon; then the darkness began to creep 
about it, and it grew sombre, drooping into purple, 
withering into brown, dwindling into a dull violet, 
and from that wandering into a fainter and fainter 
greyness, until the roofs, jutting like abrupt shadows 
into the night, seemed to go up like smoke all round 
the city, as if the great fire were smouldering out. 
Darkness came on rapidly, there was no moon, and 
as I stood, just before midnight, by the side of the 
Forum, under the shadow of the Arch of Septimius 
Severus, I seemed at first to be standing at the edge 
of a great black abyss. Gradually, as I looked down, 
I became aware of a sort of rocky sea, a dark sea of 
white and slender rocks, which, as I watched them, 



4 ROME 

seemed to heighten into the night. Near the tri- 
umphal arch I could distinguish the eight smooth 
columns of the Temple of Saturn; there, on the 
other side of this gulf, was the Palatine; and but 
a little to my left, though unseen, the Arch of 
Titus, and the Colosseum. In those imperishable 
ruins, which are still, after more than twenty 
centuries, the true Rome, the Rome which really 
exists, I saw the only human immortality which 
I had ever visibly seen. The twelve strokes of 
midnight, coming from the Christian churches on 
all sides, sounded faintly, as if they did but reckon 
the time of years, not of centuries. It was Pagan 
Rome that lasted, and Pagan Rome means humanity, 
working regardless of itself, and with the world at 
its feet, as a quarry to build from. This Rome, 
even in ruins, bows the mind before its strength, 
its purpose, its inflexible success. I had come to 
Rome thinking that it was as the city of the 
Popes that I should see the Eternal City. I was 
filled only with a sense of the power of things earthly, 
the eternity of an art wholly the work of men's 
hands, as I turned away from the Forum, in those 
first moments of the new year. I looked back: the 
Arch of Septimius Severus stood up white and 
gigantic, blotting out the sky. 

The soul of Rome, as one gradually realises it, 
first, I think, and not least intimately, from the 
Aurelian Wall, then from the Colosseum, the Pan- 
theon, the Forum, the Stadium, and then piece by 



ROME 5 

piece, from the Vatican, the Diocletian, the Capi- 
toHne galleries of sculpture, is a very positive soul, 
all of one piece, so to speak, in which it is useless 
to search for delicate shades, the mystery of sugges- 
tion, a meaning other than the meaning which, in a 
profound enough sense, is on the surface. All these 
walls, columns, triumphal arches, the fagade of the 
Pantheon, have nothing to tell us beyond what they 
were meant to tell ; and they were meant to answer 
certain very definite purposes, and to do their work 
splendidly indeed, but without caprice. This sim- 
plicity of purpose is what makes Roman architecture 
so much more satisfying than even fine Renaissance 
architecture; and there is little fine Renaissance 
work in Rome: the Cancellaria, a palace or two. 
In architecture, more perhaps than in any other 
art, nothing is so easily comprehended, so immediate 
in its appeal to the instinct, as that greatest art, 
which is classic. Think for a moment of St. Peter's, 
while you stand before the outer wall of the Colos- 
seum. That shell of rough stone- work, from which 
every trace of ornamentation is gone, gives, even 
at first sight, a sense of satisfaction, because of the 
easy way in which those perfectly natural pro- 
portions answer to the unconscious logic of the 
eye, notwithstanding the immensity of the scale on 
which they are carried out; while St. Peter's leaves 
you bedazed, wondering, inquiring, as before a prob- 
lem of which you have not the key. For beauty 
of detail, for the charm which is not the mathematical 



6 ROME 

charm of proportion, the moral charm of strength, 
the material charm of grandeur, do not come to 
Rome. You will find no detail neglected, for all 
detail is part of a whole; but you will find no detail 
over which the workman has grown amorous, into 
which he has put something of his soul, over and 
above the work of his hands. 

To the Roman mind, as I have come to realise it 
for myself, after a winter in Rome spent in trying 
to make my general notion of these things particular, 
the world about one was always a very real, very 
desirable thing, quite enough for one's whole needs 
in a life which was at once a brief flutter of that 
winged thing, "animula, vagula, blandula," and also 
a moment which it was possible to perpetuate, by 
the work of one's hands, or the hands of slaves, 
working to order. In a world which seemed to lie 
at their feet, conquered, the sense of power, which 
the Romans had in so actual a degree, sharpened 
their desire to appropriate all the resources of what 
lay there before them, to enjoy its whole beauty, 
and to leave behind them, by their own effort, the 
assurance of what they had so vividly enjoyed. 
That monument of the baker, outside the Porta 
Maggiore, made to imitate the homely utensils of 
his trade, and still telling us that Marcus Vergilius 
Erysaces, who lies under those stones, sold his bread 
in the city, seems to me a significant indication of 
this resolute hold on the earth, on the day's work, 
and this resolution to perpetuate it. It is the 



ROME 7 

more significant because for the most part a mere 
citizen in Rome must have counted for very Httle. 
As the world was for Rome, so Rome was for 
the State, and the State, after all, was for the 
Cffisars. 

And so it is that we find the one really satisfying 
work in sculpture left by the Romans to be the 
Antinous, repeated over and over again, in an almost 
mechanical carrying out of the will of Hadrian, but 
coming, at its best, to a kind of perfection. Antinous 
is the smile of the eternity of youth, and the smile is 
a little sad, for all its gracious acceptance of the 
sunlight. It is sad with youth's sensitive conscious- 
ness of the first cold breath of wind which comes to 
trouble that sunlight; a wistfulness which is the 
wistfulness of animals, and in which the soul and 
its regrets have no part. Perfect bodily sensitive- 
ness; the joy and sadness which are implicit in 
mere human breathing; a simplicity of sensation 
which comes at once into the delightful kingdom of 
things, which we are so painful in our search for, 
and thus attains a sort of complexity, or its equi- 
valent, without knowing it; life taken on its own 
terms, and without preference of moment to mo- 
ment: it is all this that I find in the grave, and 
smiling, and unthinking, and pensive head of An- 
tinous, in that day-dream of youth, just con- 
scious enough of its own felicity for so much the 
more heightened an enjoyment of that passing 
moment. 



8 ROME 

II 

Looking at Antinous, or at a young Roman model 
who lies on those spectacular steps of the Trinita de' 
Monti to-day, you realise that the Romans were born 
without a soul, and that in all these centuries of 
Christendom they have never acquired one. It has 
been the genius of the Catholic religion, whose 
temporal seat, so appropriately, has always been at 
Rome, to divine and to respond to this tempera- 
mental tendency of the people who have given it 
power. At Rome it is natural to found empires; 
the seven hills await them. Religion never could 
be mystical at Rome; it must have its part in the 
world, with all the power of the world, and all the 
world's hold on temporal felicity, and it is by an 
appeal to after all largely the Pagan sentiment in 
life and thought that the Popes have been able to 
succeed the C^sars. Never was any "mystical city 
of God" so solidly based on the stable powers of the 
earth. Church has succeeded temple, and you find 
the church superincumbent, quite literall}^, as in 
San Clemente, stratum above stratum, the chapel of 
Mithra under the apse of the Christian basilica; or, 
as in San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, where church after 
church, built over and into one another, is supported 
by columns, crowded with friezes, set together with- 
out design or order, out of ancient temples or palaces. 
Just as the theatre, dancing, music, were a part or 
appendage of the State religion, so the Church has 



ROME 9 

taken to itself all that is finest in spectacle, all that 
is rarest in singing. Those perfumed and golden 
gifts of the three old Magi to the young Christ, 
the gift of the world and its delicacies, were not 
given in vain. All the churches in Rome are full of 
incense and gold. 

To see St. Peter's is to realise all that is strongest, 
most Roman, nothing that is subtle or spiritual, in the 
power of the Church. This vast building, the largest 
church in the world, imposes itself upon you, where- 
ever you are in Rome; you see the dome from the 
Alban or the Sabine hills, from which the whole city 
seems dwindled to a white shadow upon a green 
plain. Before it lies all Rome, behind it the vague 
desolation of fruitless fields, ruinous houses, a 
mouldering wall, a few ragged trees. I climbed one 
evening, about sunset, on a day when the sky 
itself had the desolation of brooding storms, to the 
strip of narrow, untrodden ground behind it, which 
rises from the Via Scaccia, going down on the other 
side to the Via della Zecca. It stood there hiding 
the whole city and half the sky, a vast grey bulk; 
now and again the moon, looking through a rift in 
the clouds, touched the leaden roof with a finger of 
light; the cypresses, seeming to lean against the 
white walls at the base, turned blacker; a few gas 
lamps shone about it like gold candles about the 
high altar; and gradually, as I watched, light after 
light sprang up out of the deep streets and pre- 
cipitous houses, the hills grew darker, and more 



lo ROME 

vague, and the solid mass itself, now a looming 
greyness, seemed to float like a great shadow into 
the depths of the night. And always, by day, looked 
at from within or without, it is by its immensity, 
its spectacular qualities, that it is impressive. To 
walk across the floor is like taking a journey; voices 
chanting in a side chapel can only just be heard 
from the opposite aisle; and, looking at the four 
piers which support the dome, one remembers that 
the church of San Carlino alle Quattro Fontane, 
by no means a small church, is exactly the size of 
one of those four piers. Everything, the whole 
decoration, in order that it may be in proportion 
to the scale of the building, is exaggerated, and 
almost no detail bears an intimate examination, or 
can give one a separate sensation of pleasure; for 
the few lovely things, like Michelangelo's Pieta, 
are lost in little chapels, where they exist quietly, 
in their corners, like a fine, silent criticism of all this 
display, these florid Popes and angels, this noisy 
architectural rhetoric. And St. Peter's, impressing 
you, as it certainly does, with its tremendous size, 
strength, wealth, and the tireless, enduring power 
which has called it into being, holds you at a distance, 
with the true ecclesiastical frigidity. You learn here 
how to distinguish between what is emotional and 
what is properly ecclesiastical in the Catholic Church. 
St. Peter's is entirely positive, dogmatic, the asser- 
tion of the supremacy of the Church over the world ; 
never mystic, as in one of those dim Spanish cathe- 



ROME II 

drals, that of Barcelona, for instance; nor yet fan- 
tastic, full of strange, precious wonders of the world, 
brought from far off, as in St. Mark's. It is florid, 
spectacular, but never profane; suggesting, as it 
does, what is the strength, and what are also the 
metaphysical limitations of the Church, it never 
suggests, as St. Mark's does, the human curiosities 
which may become a strange vice, as easily as a 
singular virtue. Nor is it, like St. Mark's, in the 
midst of the city, where the heart of the city beats, 
where one sees a homely crowd wandering in and 
out all day long, looking in on the way home from 
market, as one might look in for a moment at a 
friend's house. 

High Mass at St. Peter's, as I saw it on Christmas 
Day, said by Cardinal RampoUa, was an impressive 
ceremony, indeed, but it was said mainly to a crowd 
of curious strangers. The large, rigid figure in the 
red robes and the gold mitre, who sat there under 
his golden vestments, lifting a white- gloved hand on 
whose third finger shone the emerald ring set with 
diamonds, performed the sacred functions with a 
dignity which was a little weary, and in the priest's 
expressionless way, with that air of fixed meditation 
(as of a continual commerce with heaven) which is 
the Church's manner of expressing disapproval of 
the world. Where I seemed to see a real devotion 
was in the peasants from the Campagna, who passed 
with their rough cloaks rolled round them, and 
kissed St. Peter's foot devoutly, leaning their fore- 



12 ROME 

heads against it; the women carefully rubbing the 
toe with their handkerchiefs before kissing it. I 
saw the same deep feeling in a fifteenth-century 
church into which I went that afternoon, S. Agostino, 
a church famed for its devotion. A whole wall was 
covered mth little gilt-framed votive offerings, silver 
hearts, and pious vows, and in front of them many 
poor old women sat and knelt, praying with closed 
eyes; others lifted their children to kiss the foot 
of Sansovino's patrician Virgin, the compassionate 
Madonna del Parto. I found a different, but per- 
haps not less sincere, company of worshippers in 
San Luigi dei Francesi, before that screen of candles, 
like burning gold, gold light rising flamelike out of 
gilt candlesticks, which enshrined for their devotion 
the unseen presence of the Sacrament. But at the 
midnight Mass in the same church, which was 
attended by a special permission, I was once more 
in that atmosphere of positive, unspiritual things 
which I had breathed in St. Peter's, and which 
seemed to me so typical of Rome. The church 
was filled to its farthest corner by a brilliant crowd ; 
the music, played by organ, harp, and strings, 
and sung by somewhat uncertain voices, was florid 
and brilliant; and far off, at the golden end of the 
church, white against the gold light, seven rows of 
candles rising like an arch of pure gold, the priests 
moved through the sacred ritual. Near me were 
some Italians, two of them women of the finest 
aristocratic type, with faces carved like cameos, a 



ROME 13 

touch of cruelty in their dark, vivid, reticent dignity; 
and these faces, looking on as at a show, and pre- 
pared to look away the moment it was no longer 
amusing, seemed to bring all the strength of the 
world's hold on one into the perfumed atmosphere 
of the place. Looking, as I could not but look, at 
these beautiful Pagan faces, perfect as Roman 
medals, I felt that they were Rome, and that Rome 
was at least sure of this world, whatever her ad- 
miration, her curiosity, her possible dreams, of 
another. 



Ill 



"The grandeur that was Rome": that phrase of 
Poe's sums up perfectly the impression which Rome, 
even now, makes upon the observer. The secret 
of what is most impressive there is the choice 
(miraculous, we are led to suppose, and can well 
believe) of its site. A city built upon seven hills, 
hills which have arranged themselves, naturally, with 
such an art of impressive composition, can have no 
rival among the cities of the world in its appeal to 
the sense of material grandeur. That the Senate 
should throne itself upon the Capitol, that the 
palaces of the Cassars should have been on the Pala- 
tine or the Esquiline, was an almost incalculable 
aid to the pomp of State. St. Peter's, seen in the 
sky from all Rome, thrones Catholicism on a similar 
eminence. Everything in Rome impresses by its 



14 ROME 

height, by an amplitude of adjusted proportions, 
which is far more than the mere equivalent of vast 
spaces covered, as in London, invisible for its very 
size. The pride of looking down, the pride of 
having something to look up to, are alike satisfied 
for the Romans, by what nature and art have done 
for Rome. 

This Roman grandeur began by being colossally 
simple. I find all the grandeur of Rome in even 
so late a work as the Aurelian Wall, and that is 
nothing but a bare, brown, precipitous line of 
masonry, patched with the mendings of all the 
ages. The Colosseum, the Pantheon, for all their 
original splendour of decoration, still exist with such 
potency, now that they are reduced to the bare 
elements of their construction, because the simplicity 
of that construction was the primary concern of 
Vespasian and Titus, of Agrippa and Hadrian, in 
building them. Effect is aimed at, and the effect 
is always that of impressing by size; but the effect 
is sought legitimately, with the finest materials, 
their most natural, however sumptuous, arrange- 
ment, and that Roman way of going straight to an 
end, like their roads, though at the cost of an army of 
men, a treasury of gold. In the work of the Middle 
Ages, of the Renaissance, of the seventeenth century, 
we find the same effect aimed at, but with a sumptu- 
ousness not duly subordinated, and turning fre- 
quently (as in the extravagances of the typical 
Bernini) into colossal bad taste. Yet still, to this 



ROME 15 

moment, Rome is the most pompous, the most mag- 
nificent, of Western cities. Was there ever a more 
imposing public square than that vast, florid Piazza 
del Popolo, by which, before the days of the railway, 
strangers entered Rome? almost nowhere entirely 
commendable in detail, but with what an art of 
effect in its remote corners, into which no crowd 
can stretch, its three long, straight, narrow vistas 
into the city, its terraced and columned heights, its 
great gateway. The square in which St. Peter's 
stands, with that colonnade which Bernini set up 
in his one moment of genius; the dark irregular, 
half-concealed palace of the Vatican holding on to 
a corner of the great church; the square itself, with 
its obelisk, the two fountains, the stones worn by 
all the pilgrims of the world ; no other square makes 
quite the same appeal to one, or suggests so much 
of the world's history. And how impressive, cer- 
tainly how sumptuous, are all these immense, never 
quite architecturally satisfying churches, heaped 
against the sky at the corner of every square, dig- 
nifying the poverty of even the humblest streets, 
leaving, like San Paolo fuori le Mura, infinite riches 
run to waste in the unpopulated Campagna! You 
can scarcely walk for five minutes in any direction 
without coming on something, perhaps incongruous 
where it is, like the eleven Corinthian columns of 
Hadrian's Temple of Neptune, forty feet high, now 
filled up with modern brick-work, and made into 
the Exchange ; something absolutely startling, some- 



i6 ROME 

thing vast and sudden, it may be only the Trevi 
Fountain, it may be the Theatre of Marcellus, the 
Capitol itself. And the appropriate d^cor of life 
awaits every occasion, ready set; for what occasion 
is there in life which was not anticipated and pre- 
pared for, with learned, foreseeing taste, centuries 
ago, in those times when Rome had perfected the 
arts of life as now only the Eastern races ever dream 
of perfecting them? Think, in the baths of Cara- 
calla or of Diocletian, among the trees and ruins of 
the Palatine; or, with less of the historic effort, in 
the gardens of the Villa Albani, with their alleys of 
shaven box, carved into niches for statues; of the 
Villa Borghese, with their avenues of ilex, their 
grassy amphitheatre; of the Villa Doria-Pamphili, 
which is like an English park, laid out by a French 
gardener; in the Bosco of the Villa Medici, wild 
and delicate, with its staircase going up between 
the trees to the sky; think what a decor lies before 
one, gone to waste, or at least wasted, for a life of 
the most triumphant pleasure! To live in Rome 
is to understand all the coloured and spectacular 
vices of the C^sars, all the elaborate sins of the 
Renaissance. Occasions so great as these have 
gone, but the possibilities remain, awaiting only 
their opportunity. 

IV 

Rome is a sea in which many worlds have gone 



ROME 17 

down, and its very pavement is all in waves; so that 
to drive through these narrow streets, and across 
these broad squares, in which there is no footway 
over which a wheel may not drive, is like rocking in 
a boat on slightly uneasy water. The soil every- 
where heaves over still buried ruins, which may 
hold (who knows?) another Apoxyomenos. And, 
as no other great city in the world is, the whole of 
Rome is one vast museum, in which the very 
galleries, palaces, churches, which contain the finest 
of its treasures, are themselves but single items in 
that museum w^hich is Rome. And what gives to 
all this precisely its special charm, and also its special 
value to the student, is that Rome is still a living city, 
the capital of a nation, and with an actual life of its 
own, which, often enough, can be seen in its direct 
descent from antiquity. The Roman people have 
always had a sense of the continuity of their national 
life, of their literal part in the inheritance of their 
ancestors. One sees it, sometimes with a quaint 
grotesqueness, in the simple-minded way in which, 
just as they Christianised Pagan temples, so they 
have always taken to themselves and turned to their 
own uses the monuments of all the ages: Pasquino, 
Marforio, Madama Lucrezia, the Bocca della Verita; 
the religion of one age becoming the mouthpiece for 
the satire or criticism of the next, as the Pagan gods 
in exile, in the Christian Middle Ages, became 
demons, haunting the souls of men with their perilous 
beauty. One sees it, at the present day, in that 



i8 ROME 

singular deification of Vittorio Emanuele, which is 
really an apotheosis, after the manner of the apo- 
theoses of the Roman emperors; and quite after 
their ruthless manner is that waste of thousands of 
pounds in the destruction of certain old streets, 
which were beautiful, for the proper view of an 
equestrian statue, which will be hideous. And 
then, in the actual museums, the palace of the 
Vatican, the palace of the Conservator!, the baths of 
Diocletian, what a prepared atmosphere one finds 
and how much more at home in these courts, fres- 
coed halls, papal summer-houses, Carthusian clois- 
ters, is all this white, chosen humanity of statues, 
which, if they ** remember their august abodes," 
must certainly pine less for Greece, which they left 
so early, than any other marble beings in the world. 
Since 1 have been in Rome I have realised, for my- 
self, many things about Greek art, which not all 
the study of sculpture in London, Paris, and Berlin 
has taught me; and I have been able to see it, not 
only as the greatest, the most "classic" art of the 
world, but as the most living, responsive, intimately 
delightful. And this is certainly because I have 
seen it where it could be seen more like something" 
in its natural place, less like something on show, than 
an3rwhere out of Greece. 

And in painting, too, one has the opportunity of 
making certain not unsimilar discoveries. Rome is 
not rich in easel-pictures, nor yet in altar-pieces, 
but it is only in Rome that it is possible to realise, to 



ROME 19 

the full extent of their gifts and limitations, the 
pictorial genius of Michelangelo, of Raphael, and 
of Pinturicchio. Michelangelo in the decoration of 
the Sistine Chapel, Raphael in the decoration of the 
Stanze and Logge, Pinturicchio in the decoration of 
the Appartamento Borgia, of the Vatican, is seen 
working as the painter loves to work, in the one 
really satisfying way in which he can work, archi- 
tecturally, for the adornment of a given space, which 
is part of the essential life of a building. And so 
these frescoes, as no picture in a museum could ever 
be, are an actual part of Rome, precisely as much a 
part of it as the Vatican itself. 

In the Sistine Chapel there are admirable paint- 
ings by Botticelli, by Signorelli, by Perugino, but 
one can see nothing there but Michelangelo. And 
the emotion of first seeing this immense world created 
by Michelangelo seized me with a delighted awe, 
such as I could imagine to have stirred in the soul 
of Adam when he awoke and beheld the world. 
Other things are beautiful, exquisite, subtle, but 
these seem to contain all beautiful and exquisite 
and subtle things, and to disregard them. In the 
passion of this overwhelming life which burns 
through every line, there is for once the creating 
joy of the artist, flawless, unimpaired, unchecked, 
fulfilling its desire as not even the Greeks have 
done; for desire, in them, was restrained by a sense 
of delicate harmony, to which it was the triumphant 
self-sacrifice of their art to conform. Here we have 



20 ROME 

no sense of even so much of mortal concession to 
the demands of immortality; but the unbounded 
spirit seems to revel in the absoluteness of its free- 
dom. Here, at last, here indeed for the first time 
is all that can be meant by sublimity; a sublimity 
which attains its pre-eminence through no sacrifice 
of other qualities; a sublimity which (let us say it 
frankly) is amusing. I find the magnificent and 
extreme life of these figures as touching, intimate, 
and direct in its appeal as the most vivid and 
gracious realism of any easel-picture: God, the 
Father and the Son, the Virgin, the men and women 
of the Old Testament, the Sibyls, the risen dead of 
the Last Judgment, all these tremendous symbols 
of whatever has been divined by the spirit or sought 
out by the wisdom of the ages crowd upon one with 
the palpable, irresistible nearness of the people who 
throng one in one's passage through the actual 
world. It seemed to me then, it still seems to me, 
strange that I should have felt it, but never before 
had I felt so much at home among paintings, so 
little of a mere spectator. One seems to be of the 
same vivid and eternal world as these joyous and 
meditative beings, joyous and meditative even in 
hell, where the rapture of their torment broods in 
eyes and limbs with the same energy as the rapture 
of God in creation, of the woman in disobedience, or 
of Isaiah in vision. They are close to one, I think, 
partly because they are so far away; because no 
subtlety in the eyes or lips, no delicacy in the fold 



ROME 21 

of garments, none of the curious and discoverable 
ways by which art imitates and beautifies nature, 
can distract one from the immediate impress of such 
passionate and obsessing Hf e. Art ceases to approach 
one directly, through this sense or that, through 
colour, or suggested motion, or some fancied outlook 
of the soul; it comes straight to one, boldly, seizing 
one at once by that instinct of immediate recognition, 
by which, except here, only perhaps the direct works 
of God have ever approached and revealed them- 
selves to the soul of man. 

Now turn to Raphael. Here, on the contrary, 
we have art so obvious in its concealment of art 
that it becomes the idol of the crowd, and ceases 
to interest the more curious dreamer before pictures. 
Raphael is the instinctively triumphant perfection of 
the ideal of the average man; he is what scarcely 
the greatest of painters can be, and what only 
mediocre painters have desired to be. Here is the 
simplicity of what is called inspiration: the ease of 
doing, better than any one else, what the greater 
number would like, better than anything else, to do. 
And he is miraculous; yet a miracle which just fails 
to interest one; because, I think, he is essentially 
exterior, and his pictures a dream of the hand 
rather than a dream of the soul. Even that peace 
which he can convey with so delicate a power 
seems to me rather the slumber than the ecstasy 
of peace. His Madonnas have no foresight in 
their eyes of the seven swords with which the 



22 ROME 

divine child is to pierce their breasts. His gracious 
saints have never, before they attained sanctity, 
suffered all the enlightening ardours of sin. His 
martyrs have no memory, either of death, by which 
they have passed, or of heaven, to which they have 
come. All the pe.'sons of his pictures live, some- 
what unthinkingly, in the moment which their 
gesture perpetuates; they have but that gesture. 
We see eternity in the moment of fierce meditation 
which Michelangelo calls up before us, as if thought 
in the brows and hands were about to relax or 
resolve itself into some other of the unaccountable 
moods of so elemental a being. In the painful, 
intense face of a Velasquez we see the passionate 
frailties, the morbid, minute hatreds of a long race 
of just such suffering and reticent beings. And 
in the smile which wanders, lurking in the im- 
perceptible corner of lip or eyelid, across the faces 
of Leonardo, we see the enigma of whatever is 
most secret, alluring, inexplicable, in the mysterious 
charm of human beauty; that look which seems to 
remember, and is perhaps only a forgetfulness. But 
the people of Raphael live in the content of that 
one gracious moment in which they lift their hands 
in prayer or benediction, or open their untroubled 
eyes to that moment's sunlight. 

The art of Pinturicchio, which can now, since the 
opening of the Appartamento Borgia in the Vatican, 
be studied more completely at Rome than even at 
Siena, is another, a more primitive, but not less 



ROME 23 

individual art. Those frescoes, simply as decora- 
tions, are as beautiful as any decorations that were 
ever done; and they are at once an arabesque, in 
which everything seems to exist simply in order 
that it may be a moment's beautiful colour on a 
wall, and a piece of homely realism, in which every 
figure seems to be a portrait, and every animal, tree, 
and jewel to be painted for its own sake. There 
is not a little naivete in the design, a technique 
in which there is none of the confident sureness 
of hand of either Raphael or Michelangelo, but a 
certain hesitation, an almost timid recourse to such 
expedients as the use of stucco in relief, and even 
of painted wood, glued upon the flat surface to 
represent a tower or a gateway. But you feel 
that the man has something to say, that, to be 
more accurate, he sees pictures; and that this 
simple and sumptuous and real and imaginary 
world, which he has called into being in order that 
it may remind us of the world about us, and be 
more beautiful, and so be a delight to the eyes 
and a repose to the soul, is not only an unsurpassed 
piece of decoration, but the revelation of a tempera- 
ment to which beauty was perhaps more beautiful 
for its own sake than to any other painter. Pin- 
turicchio loves the world, animals, trees, human 
faces, the elegance of men and women in courtly, 
coloured dresses, youth with its simple pride of 
existence, kings for their gold and purple robes, 
saints for the divine calm of their eyelids and the 



24 ROME 

plaintive grace of their slim hands, all the world's 
beauty as it comes up like the flower of the grass, 
and especially that beauty which takes no thought 
of itself; and he loves it with so simple and humble 
and absorbing a love that he paints it just as he 
sees it, almost without thinking of his own share in 
the work. That is why this select and coloured 
world of his, in which there is no passionate or 
visionary life, as in Michelangelo, nor that com- 
posed and conscious presence in time and space of 
the people of Raphael, lives with such simplicity, as 
if filled with a calm and joyous sense of its own 
beauty. To live under the decorations of Michel- 
angelo would be as exhausting as to live in a world 
in which every person was a person of genius. 
To live amongst the decorations of Raphael would 
be to live amongst people of too placid, too amiable 
disposition, and too limited intelligence; it would 
become a weariness, But one need never cease to 
live happily amongst the men and women whom 
Pinturicchio saw walking in beautiful robes, that 
were never woven so finely by hands in meadows of 
gold flowers, that never grew out of the brown earth, 
always finding heaven, a heaven of chrysoprase and 
chalcedony, at a turn of the way, and without sur- 
prise; for these and their abode have the beauty 
that we desire to find in the world, in what is most 
homely, obvious, and frequent in it, the beauty that 
is there, if we could see it, and the beauty that for 
the most part we do not see, because we are too 



ROME 25 

sophisticated, too conscious of ourselves, and be- 
cause we discover too thoughtful a consciousness 
of themselves in natural things. 



To realise the greatness of Rome, it is not enough 
to have seen the Colosseum, St. Peter's, the churches, 
palaces, ruins, squares, fountains, and gardens; you 
may have seen all these, and yet not have seen the 
most beautiful possession of Rome: the Campagna. 
Seen from the Alban hills, Rome is a mere cluster 
of white houses in a desert, a desert as variable in 
colour as the sky. Lost in that wilderness, a speck 
between that wilderness and the sky, it seems a 
mere accident in a visible infinity. And now re- 
member that this vast Campagna is simply the 
pleasure park of Rome : that it is left there, feverous 
and unproductive, the loveliest of ruins, in order 
that Rome may have the pride of possessing it; 
and think if any city in the world possesses so 
costly and magnificent a luxury. 

It is one of the many delicate surprises of Rome 
to come suddenly, at the end of a street which had 
seemed lost in the entanglements of the city, upon 
a glimpse of the Campagna or the hills. And those 
hills, rising up from the plain to the sky, their soft 
lines, under certain weather, indistinguishable from 
either, opalescent, changing colour as the wind 
scatters or heaps the clouds, as sunlight or scirocco 



26 ROME 

passes over them, have something of the untiring 
charm, the infinite variety, of the sea. Drive a 
little way into the Campagna, and you might be on 
the Pampas, or in the desert which is about the ruins 
of Thebes. An almost audible silence descends 
upon you, in which the world seems asleep. A shep- 
herd leans motionless upon his staff; the sheep 
move drowsily about him ; and you hear the tinkle of 
the bell. 

To see Tivoli, loud and white with waterfalls, a 
little grey town set upon grey and cloven rocks, 
fringed with the silvery green of olive trees; to see 
any one of the castelli, one would willingly cross a 
whole country; and they lie, Frascati, Albano, 
Genzano, Marino, Ariccia, Rocca di Papa, at the 
very gates of Rome, within the compass of one 
day's drive. These castelli are all fantastic and 
improbable; white, huddled, perched like flights of 
white birds that have settled there; hanging over 
volcanic chasms that have burst into lakes, fertilised 
into vines and olives; wild trees, their grey trunks 
leaning this way and that, seeming to face up and 
down the hillside, like armies meeting in battle; 
each castello with its own rococo villas, like incrusta- 
tions upon the rock ; each castello set on its own hill, 
as if it had drawn up the ladder after having climbed 
there: a little city of refuge from the perils of the 
plain. They hold the Alban Lake between them, and 
Lake Nemi, which sleeps with the deepest sleep of 
any lake I have ever seen, in the most restful arms of 



ROME 27 

land. And each has its own aspect. Frascati, as 
one turns in and out of its streets, opening suddenly 
on vague glimpses, as if cut by the sides of a frame, 
is like a seaside village ; and one cannot help imagin- 
ing the wash of waves, instead of the grassy plain of 
the Campagna, at the end of those coiling streets. 
Rocca di Papa is like an eagle's nest, perched high 
on the mountain, with its shady square in front of 
the little church where you hear old women praying 
aloud. Marino has an air of the country, with its 
fierce men, its somewhat bold, handsome women, its 
thronging children. Ariccia hangs picturesquely 
against the very side of the hill, jutting out into 
space. Each has its variety of primitive life, of 
rococo architecture, of running water, of trees, of 
volcanic rock, of lake scenery. And for those who 
care greatly for the delicate shading of colours as 
they change over a sensitive landscape, to look from 
these heights is to look down, from dawn till sun- 
set, upon a paradise of the daintiest colours in the 
world, in that jewelled desert which lies about Rome. 
But the Campagna is most wonderful, most itself, 
at sunset ; and sunset in Rome should be seen from 
the Via Appia, as I saw it during a memorable drive 
in mid-winter. Looking back from the mound 
beyond the Casal Rotondo, Rome seemed far off, 
dwindled by distance, all its towers and domes and 
roofs white, set in the hollow of the hills. Nearer 
to me, Frascati, a white sparkle upon the dark 
Alban hills : between, along the sky, the Apennines, 



28 ROME 

their snow lying caressingly against the clouds; and 
below, all around me, the desert of the Campagna, 
the long grey line of the aqueducts seeming to 
impress itself, with a certain insistency, upon the 
otherwise timeless waste of the great plain. A 
church bell sounded faintly, like the sound of a 
cow-bell, from a Httle white church on the Via Appia 
Nuova; the air was still, clear, cold, with a marvel- 
lous serenity in its soft brightness; and as I looked 
across the Campagna, going out desolately towards 
the sea, I could just distinguish a light shining 
along the line of dark trees at the edge of the horizon. 
Hearing a slow creaking of wheels, I looked down, 
and saw in a road two lounging oxen drawing a 
load of silvery ilex boughs. Two peasants went 
by, lounging like the oxen, in their long-haired 
garments of undressed skins; shepherds who had 
come down from the Apennines for the winter, with 
their flocks and herds, and had encamped upon the 
plain, in the little conical huts which rise out of it 
-€o strangely. Sunset was beginning, and, as we 
drove back along the Via Appia, the clouds which 
had obscured the sun cleared away, and the sky 
seemed to be washed with colours which were at 
once fiery and watery: greens of an inexpressibly 
luminous delicacy, paler and softer than any grass 
or leaf that ever grew, but with the ardour in them 
of growing things; pinks that were like the inner 
petals of rose-leaves, flushing on the horizon to a 
fierce golden red, which burned in the tops of the 



ROME 29 

trees like a conflagration, and at the edges floating 
away into paler and paler gold, and from that into 
the green of moonlit water, and from that into a blue 
which was the colour of shallow water under very 
faint sunlight, a blue which deepened overhead into 
the vast outstretched dome of the sky. The air 
grew chill, with that intense cold which seems to 
come down out of the sky upon Rome for an hour 
after sunset. We drove back, along the straight 
road, between the ruined tombs which had once 
stood at the gates of the villas of Romans, and 
which stand now, in their ruins, seeming to look 
as the Romans loved to look, on the road which was 
the world's highway; that long road leading into the 
Eternal City (upon w^hich, indeed, the ends of the 
earth are still visibly come) out of the vague world. 
In so beautiful a desolation, at which the soul shivers 
away into that loneliness which is the soul's ecstasy 
before eternal things, I said to myself that here, if 
anywhere upon earth, God and man had w^orked 
together to show at one glimpse all the glory of the 
world. 



VI 



Perhaps my most agreeable recollection of a 
winter spent in Rome is the recollection of in- 
numerable drives with a friend in the Roman Cam- 
pagna and about the Castelli Romani. The Comte 
de B., after a lifetime of disinterested travelling, 



30 ROME 

in which he trained his eyes to a perfect suscep- 
tibility, and his judgment to a perfect impartial- 
ity in the noting and comparison of so much of 
the world's scenery, came finally to a deliberate 
preference of this scenery about Rome as the most 
beautiful in the world, a deliberate choice of it as 
the scenery most appropriate, at all events, to the 
demands of his own temperament, the requirements 
of his own meditations. And it is through his 
eyes, certainly, that I first learned to see the Cam- 
pagna, which, like all profound beauty, does not 
reveal itself to all, with the insolent challenge of 
Alps, the feminine seductiveness of meadow-lands; 
and I cannot evoke for myself the spectacle of the 
Roman landscape without seeing in its midst so 
difficult, so constant, so learned a lover of it; for 
this strange, attractive figure, the traveller, the 
student of race, the student of history, with his 
courtly violence, his resolute pieties, his humorous 
prejudices softening the rigour of a singular spiritual 
equanimity, his reticent, self-absorbed, and yet 
gracious and affectionate temperament, seemed to 
me, in his lifetime, himself an inevitable figure in 
that landscape. 

The beauty of the Campagna is a soft, gradual, 
changing beauty, whose extreme delicacy is made 
out of the action upon one another of savage and 
poisonous forces. The line of the Alban mountains, 
against the clear sky, is the most harmonious line 
of mountains that I have ever seen ; but its pathetic 



ROME 31 

grace, in which there is almost the appeal of music, 
comes to it from the tumultuous caprice of volcanic 
fires. The great plain, which, seen from the hills, 
is like a gently undulating sea, covered with soft 
and variable tints as the sunlight wanders across it, 
is a desert of lava, barren soil, and lank herbage, 
discoloured grass and the far from ''tufted" as- 
phodel. The malaria which always lurks there 
has thinned and withered and bent the few shep- 
herds and herdsmen who are its only inhabitants. 
Its silence is the silence of desolation. It is ridged 
with broken aqueducts, strewn with the fragments 
of the tombs and villas of Romans. Before Rome 
was, it was Latium, the birthplace of the Latin 
people. It hides under it the Catacombs of the 
Christians. All the changes of the earth and of the 
world have passed over it, ruining it with elaborate 
cruelty; and they have only added subtlety to its 
natural beauty, and memories to that beauty of 
association which is a part of the spirit of places. 

But the charm of the Campagna depends also, 
more than most landscapes, on weather, on the hour 
at which one sees it; and it has different aspects, 
seems to reveal to one a different secret, as one 
approaches it from this gate or that. Our drive 
was usually timed to end with sunset, and sunset 
is the most surprising and illusive hour at which to 
see the Campagna. I remember the first sunset 
I ever saw there. We had driven around the 
deserted outer side of the Aurelian Wall, between 



32 ROME 

the canne, rustling loudly, rattling against one an- 
other, in the rising tramontana, and the tall brown 
wall, in which the stones are of every age and 
recall every ruler of Rome. The air was cold and 
bright, and as we came near the Porta San Paolo 
sunset was beginning to streak a pale sky with faint 
bands of rose and green, against which I saw the 
c^^presses of Shelley's graveyard and the Pyramid 
of Cestius. The sky flushed, moment by moment, 
with brighter and brighter, yet always delicate, 
colour, a faint rose which reddened to fire, splashing 
with sidelong jets of flame the pallid green which 
brightened miraculously to a watery colour as green 
as grass, yet as luminous as moonlight. Green 
melted into gold, red into the faintest of rose, as 
if an inner heat burned them, and every colour was 
reflected in diminishing shades, above and below, 
upon the sky itself. And this light in the sky 
seemed to reflect itself, as in a mirror, all over the 
Campagna, which changed sensitively as every 
colour changed in the sky. In a time of scirocco, 
when I have seen the vapour rolling in from the 
hills, the whole plain has seemed to wither into an 
ashen greyness; at noon, under steady sunlight, it 
has shimmered with gold; at night, when I have 
climbed a high wooded bank which lies outside 
the Porta del Popolo, I have seen it lying under its 
network of silver mist, the Tiber hurrying through 
it, curved like a crescent. And always, closing 
in the plain as with a magic circle, there has been 



ROME 33 

the soft line of the Alban hills, the sharper indenta- 
tions of the Sabine hills, and beyond, the snow upon 
the Apennines. 

The beauty of the little hill-towns which rise out 
of the Campagna, like rocks rising out of the sea, 
has really the character of a kind of inland sea-coast, 
in which the houses themselves take a precipitous 
and rocky air, clinging, as they do at Ariccia, to a 
scant foothold over a gulf, or, at Rocca di Papa, to 
the bare side of the mountain ; and they have, along 
with this shy and withdrawn savagery of aspect, to 
which the quite recent legends of brigandage add 
a certain confirmation, something almost artificial in 
their exquisite poise, their spectacular appropriate- 
ness of detail, the happy accidents of their grouping 
and the rococo adornment of their villas, built for 
Popes and princes. It is by their artificiality that 
they seem to attach themselves to Rome, by that 
side of them which is delicate and ornate; their 
ruggedness, the freshness of their mountain air, the 
colour in the rough cheeks of their peasants, the 
flavour of their wine and flowers, are all their own, 
and have nothing in common with anything Roman. 
Only Tivoli seems to me in a sense Roman, one of 
the great things of Rome, on the same natural scale 
as the great buildings there; what is artificial in 
its waterfalls and gorges and the terraced Villa 
d'Este being done consummately, and with a com- 
plete harmony of adaptation. 

And, like the Campagna, these castelli have their 



34 ROME 

secrets, which are not quite ready to reveal them- 
selves to every comer. At Frascati, for instance, 
even the Villa Aldobrandini is, in a sense, one of 
the show-villas ; that villa which, if you read closely 
enough in Pater's "Marius," you will find described 
as the house of a certain "aristocratic poet who 
loved every sort of superiorities," where Marius 
meets Apuleius. ''Whereupon," we are told, "the 
numerous cascades of the precipitous garden of the 
villa, framed in the doorway of the hall, fell into a 
harmless picture, in its place among the pictures 
within, and hardly more real than they." Yet, even 
there I do not find the intimacy, the penetrating 
strangeness, of the neglected gardens of the Villa 
Falconieri, higher up on the other side of the climb- 
ing roadway, entered by a gate flowered through by 
the whole body of an immense, twisted, very ancient 
tree, which has been allowed so fantastic a whim 
of growth. There is a little lake on a plateau at 
the highest point of those gardens, which I shall 
remember even if I forget Lake Nemi itself, and 
that "mirror of Diana" is the most purely beautiful 
lake I have ever seen. This space of dark water 
is closed in on three sides by tall, motionless cy- 
presses, their solemn green, menacing enough in 
itself, reflected like great cubes of blackness, point- 
ing downwards at the sky. The waters are always 
dark, even in full sunlight; they have always that 
weight upon them of the funereal trees which stand 
between them and the sun; and through the cy- 



ROME 35 

presses you can see Rome, far away, beyond the 
gardens, the stacked vines, the olive-trees, and the 
indefinite wilderness, set there like a heap of white 
stones. I scarcely know what it is that this un- 
accountable scene awaits; but it seems to wait. 
Disillusioned lovers might walk there, chill even on 
a day of sun, seeing their past perhaps in that 
distant glimpse of Rome, their future in those 
cypress-shadowed depths, and their present in the 
narrow strip of brown earth between those two 
infinitudes. 

Scenery so liberal as this scenery of the Roman 
Campagna lends itself, on their own terms, to many 
minds. By whatever side human things and the 
history of the world interest you, on that side chiefly 
will you feel the attraction of the Campagna. To 
the friend in whose company I frequented it it 
was a mirror of very definite thoughts, memories, 
speculations, with which the history and religion of 
Rome had to do. Here, he would remind me, at 
that bend of the Tiber, Cleopatra*s barge passed, 
rowing hard for Egypt; there, at the cross-roads on 
the Via Appia, Christ appeared to St. Peter, where 
the little church still asks the question, ''Domine, 
quo vadis?" Here, on the Via Ostense, a small 
chapel marks the spot where St. Peter and St. Paul 
took leave of one another before each went to his 
martyrdom; farther on, at the Tre Fontane, where 
the Trappists' friends, the birds, sing among ave- 
nues of eucalyptus, St. Paul was beheaded. To my 



36 ROME 

friend every stone had its precise memory, its legend 
or record. And that, certainly, is the most fruitful 
way of seeing the Campagna, though, indeed, one 
ignorant or heedless of these things might still come 
to prefer this to all other scenery for its own sake, 
for its mere natural sensitiveness to one's moods and 
the sunlight. 



VII 



We love cities for their gracious weather, as we 
love persons for their amiable dispositions; and 
Rome, even in winter, shows frequently a marvellous 
equanimity of temper. I have had, in December 
and January, weeks of uninterrupted sunshine, in 
which every day's promenade ended naturally, as it 
should, with sunset. And that perilous shiver of 
cold which comes over city and Campagna in the 
hour after sunset gives just that astringent touch 
which is needed for the completion of all merely 
pleasant beauty. But happiness in Rome, certainly, 
comes and goes with the wind and the sunshine. 
Withdraw the sun, and Rome is like a face from 
which the smile has faded; change the wind, and 
one's own disposition changes with it. Driving one 
day in the Campagna, outside the Porta Furba, I 
saw the scirocco. The hills above Frascati were a 
little dimmed with clouds; gradually a vast, white, 
rolling mist came violently up out of the sky beyond 
the hills; soft, stealthy, pendulous, undulating, irre- 



ROME 37 

sistible, it came coiling rapidly onward, as if a poison- 
ous life had taken shape and came serpentlike upon 
Rome. Under a chill rain these narrow streets, 
with their wrinkled stones in which the rain gathers, 
become desolate in an instant; and indoors, in these 
houses without fires, without chimneys, life becomes 
intolerable. Living, as one is apt to do here, on 
one's sensations, how can any happiness be possible 
in the absence of just what makes the happiness of 
the sensations: gracious weather, the mere liberty 
to feel without discomfort? By one's fireside in 
London a storm of winter rain matters little enough. 
But what does everything else in the world matter 
here in a downpour of rain in winter? 

And these people, one feels, are made for happi- 
ness, for the easy acceptance of things as they come. 
There is a terrible poverty in Rome, of which the 
beggars who await you at every street corner are 
but too genuine a sign. The first gesture learnt by 
the children of poor people in Rome is to hold 
out their hands for alms ; they begin when they are 
so young that they can only totter, and they are 
still holding out their hands for alms when they can 
only totter because they are so old. Yet another 
sign of it I find in the 3000 cabmen of Rome, sitting 
hungrily on their boxes, in their worm-eaten fur 
coats, too lazy to do anything but sit there holding 
out their whips to solicit every passer, and unable 
to make a decent living even in a place so frequented 
by strangers and a place where every one drives. 



38 ROME 

But even here, in these beggars and cabmen, is there 
not a certain participation, at all events, in that open- 
air life which is the felicity of Rome? "Abbiamo 
pazienza," say the poor people, and sit in the sun. 

To poor and rich alike, the whole of every part 
of the open air of Rome is a personal property. 
People stand in the streets as if in their own drawing- 
rooms; and in the Corso, especially at that hour 
of the afternoon when the thickest flow of carriages 
has passed, they stretch from side to side, forming 
into groups outside the Caffe Aragno and on both 
sides of the Piazza Colonna. But, if they can, they 
drive: Italians hate walking. This gives them a 
respect for anything on wheels, so that Rome is 
represented by its carriages, as Venice is repre- 
sented by its gondolas. They have even saintly 
warrant for it; for San Filippo Neri, one of their 
patron saints, and himself a typical Roman, set it 
down among his instructions to the faithful that, as 
a concession to the weakness of the flesh, it was 
permitted to keep a carriage. And the Romans have 
taken him so precisely at his word that they will live 
on macaroni and five soldi's worth of wine in order 
to keep a carrozza. Cardinals, again, are not 
allowed to walk in the streets; they must drive in 
a closed carriage. So it is that Rome, more than 
any other city in which driving is a luxury rather 
than a necessity, is the city where one drives. The 
constant passing of carriages, in streets where two 
can scarcely pass abreast and where there is no foot- 



ROME 39 

path, procures one, indeed, one of the few disagree- 
able sensations of Rome: the sensation, whenever 
one walks, of a wheel about to descend on one's 
heel. 

In the long, narrow, thronged Corso the press of 
carriages, as they go to and return from the Pincio, 
is so great that walking becomes difficult. But, 
all the same, I find that conventional drive alonof 
the Corso, through the Piazza del Popolo, up the 
winding terraces of the Pincio, the equivalent (and 
how much more than the equivalent!) of Hyde Park 
or the Bois de Boulogne, one of the most tolerable 
of all conventional drives. What I find specially 
charming is its universality, its equality. You will 
see the queen in her carriage with the red livery; 
the nobility, the rich bourgeois, the shopkeepers, all 
with their families; nurse-maids, women without 
hats, young clerks and young princes, passing and 
repassing, side by side, all seeming to be entirely 
contented with themselves, the fine air, the music, 
the marvellous view over Rome, in which the colours 
begin to group towards sunset. On those picturesque 
heights, high over the city; under those evergreen 
oaks by which the Romans delude themselves into 
thinking it is never winter; in sight of St. Peter's in 
the sky, and all Rome, its roofs and domes, below; 
without thought, but idly satisfied with the sunlight, 
with the band that plays to them their positive, un- 
shaded, soulless Italian music, Verdi or Mascagni, 
they pass and repass, proud of being Romans, even 



40 ROME 

if they do not take the trouble to so much as glance 
at the daily miracle of Rome. 

VIII 

The carnival, which this year, for perhaps the first 
time in ten years, was really a carnival, is simply the 
personification of Roman idleness, and a gaiety which 
is a sort of tradition. I begin to see now the mean- 
ing of those idle people, dinnerless, and with shin- 
ing boots and many rings, who stand in the Corso 
in front of the Caffe Aragno. To wear coloured 
dresses, to put on masks, to run in the streets all 
day and to dance all night, to chatter irresponsibly, 
to throw jokes and confetti about the air, and to 
forget that one is poor, that life has its to-morrow 
and has had its yesterday: this is happiness to the 
Romans, and their abandonment to it is contagious. 
It is very long since an3rthing has given me so 
inspiriting and reckless a sense of the joy of life as 
the sight of these ardent smiling faces, in which 
mirth is never vulgar, but as natural as speech ; and 
I find the mask, making all men humorously akin, 
the only form in which the idea of democracy is not 
intolerable. What a coloured whirl, in which all 
Rome seemed to become a kaleidoscope! Every- 
where a flight of white frilled things, Pierrots, 
Pulcinellas, darting, alighting, along a flowery way, 
like white birds ; flowers by day and lights by night ; 
the cars, the moccoletti; with, at night, the pathos of 



ROME 41 

streets strewn with flowers and confetti, the smell 
of trodden flowers, the feast ended. On the after- 
noon of Mercoledi Grasso I began to make my way 
along the Corso at three, and I did not reach the 
Piazza del Popolo until half-past four. And that 
difflcult way along the street, its windows all aflower 
with faces, a soft rain of coloured paper raindrops, 
the sharp hail of confetti falling all the way, flowers 
flying above one's head, settling on one's hat, tapping 
against one's cheek, was a lesson in the Italian 
temperament, its Southern capacity for simple en- 
joyment, for the true folly, that abandonment to the 
moment's whim, in which there is none of the North- 
ern brutality. Civilisation has sunk deeper into 
these people, in whom civility is a tradition; it 
has penetrated to the roots; and in this character 
so positive, so unshaded, from which the energy has 
dwindled away, but not the simplicity, the charming 
and graceful naturalness, there is the same super- 
ficial, yet in its way sufficient, quality as in the fine 
finish of these faces, equally finished in the peasant 
and in the noble. 



IX 



Northern beauty, however fine may be the line of 
its contour, is never, for good or evil, a mere beauty 
of the body, a thing beginning with itself and ending 
in itself: it contains always a suggestion; it is 
haunted by a soul; it leaves for its completion some- 



42 ROME 

thing to the imagination. But in the beauty of 
Roman women there is no trace of spiritual beauty, 
none of the softness of charm; it is the calm, assured, 
unquestioning beauty of the flesh. These are 
faces which should be seen always in pure out- 
line, for they are without melting curves, delicate 
and variable shades, or any of that suggestion which 
comes from an3rthing but their own definite qualities 
as they are in themselves. The faces of Roman 
women of the upper classes are cold, hard, finished, 
and impenetrable as cameos. In a face which is at 
all beautiful you will not find a line which is not 
perfect, and this elegance and sureness of line goes 
with that complexion which is the finest of all com- 
plexions, pure ivory, and which carries with it the 
promise of a temperament in which there is all 
the subtlety of fire. The distinction between the 
properly aristocratic and the strictly plebeian face is, 
I think, less marked in Rome than in any city. 
Almost all Roman women have regular faces, the 
profile clearly cut and in a straight line ; black hair, 
often vvdth deep tones of blue in it, and sometimes 
curling crisply; dark eyes, often of a fine uniform 
brown, large, steady, profound, with that unmeaning 
profundity which means race, and which one sees in 
the Jewess, the gipsy. They have a truly Roman 
dignity, and beneath that the true fire, without 
which dignity is but the comely shroud of a corpse ; 
and though there is not a trace in them of the soft, 
smiling, catlike air of the women of Venice, and not 



ROME 43 

much of the vivid, hardy, uncaring provocativeness 
of the women of Naples, they are content to let you 
see in them that reasonable nearness to the animal 
which no Italian woman is ashamed to acknowledge. 
They have often a certain massiveness of build 
which makes a child look like a young woman, and 
a young woman like a matron; but, for Italians, 
they are tall, and, though one sees none of the trim 
Neapolitan waists, it is but rarely that one sees, even 
among the market women bringing in their baskets 
on their heads, those square and lumpish figures 
which roll so comfortably through Venice. 

The day on which to see the Roman populace 
most easily, most significantly, is the day of San 
Stefano, at the popular saint's church on the Cse- 
lian. The circular walls are covered with fif- 
teenth century paintings of martyrdoms, naive 
saints, bold in colour and distressing in attitude, 
suffering all the tortures of Pagan ingenuity. From 
early morning till late in the afternoon an incessant 
stream of people, mostly young people, out of all 
the alleys of Rome and from all the hills of the 
Campagna, surges in and out of the narrow doorway, 
where one is almost carried off one's feet in the 
difficult passage. Outside, where there are lines of 
booths covered with sweets and toys, fruits and 
cakes, the lane has the aspect of a fair. Inside, 
there is a service going on in the choir, but few pay 
much heed to it; they have come to see the show, 
and they make the round of all the martyrdoms. 



44 ROME 

The women, almost all bareheaded, stop at the door, 
in the very press of the crowd, to pull out the folded 
handkerchief and throw it over their heads, catching 
the ends between their teeth. And face after face, 
as I watched them pass me, was absolutely beautiful ; 
now a Raphael Madonna, now a Roman goddess; 
adorable young people in whom beauty was a tradi- 
tion. Some of them had complexions like wax, 
others were as brown as mahogany; all alike had 
that finished regularity of feature to which the 
ardency or mildness of the eyes was but one detail 
the more in a perfectly harmonious picture. And 
these beautiful creatures, at once placid and vivid, 
were unconscious of their beauty, with the uncon- 
sciousness of animals; and they swarmed there like 
animals, with a heartless and innocent delight in the 
brutal details of those painted scenes of torture, in 
which they saw their ancestors torturing their an- 
cestors. As they nudged one another, their eyes 
glistening, and pointed to the saint who was being 
boiled in a cauldron, the saint whose flesh was being 
flayed off in long rolls, the female saint whose breasts 
were being cut off with a long knife, I seemed to see 
the true Roman mob as it had been of old, as it will 
always be. It was just such people as these, with 
their strong nerves, their indifference in the matter 
of human life, who used to fill the Colosseum, as 
simply as they filled the martyrs' church of San 
Stefano Rotondo, when the martyrs themselves were 
being thrown to the lions. 



} ROME 45 

X 

In a city laid out for the delight of the eyes it is 
natural that much of the most intimate charm of the 
city should linger in its villas and gardens, and there 
is nothing which gives so much the sensation of that 
mournful, yet not too mournful, atmosphere of partly 
faded splendour which is the atmosphere of Rome as 
the gardens of the Villa Mattel. Around are broken 
walls rising brown and jagged against the sky, the 
walls of the baths of Caracalla; a desolate strip of 
country on the edge of the city; and beyond, seen 
from the terraces lined with the dead bluish-green 
of cactus, the Alban hills. All the garden walks, 
where not even the cypresses are funereal nor the 
sunlight itself gay, breathe an exquisite melan- 
choly, the most delicate and seductive breath of 
decay. There are wandering terraces, slim vistas, an 
entanglement of green and wa3Award life, winding in 
and out of brown defaced walls fringed with ivy, 
and about white and broken statues shining from 
under this green cloak of leaves; everywhere sur- 
prising turns of ways among the trees curving out 
here and there, as if instinctively, into a circle about 
a fountain, where broad leaves shadow the heads of 
gods or emperors in stone. And everywhere there 
is the cool sound of water, which rises in the fountains 
and drips under water-plants in a grotto ; and every- 
where, as one follows the winding paths, a white 
hand stretches out from among the darkness of ivy, 



46 ROME 

at some turn of the way, and one seems to catch the 
escaping flutter of white drapery among the leaves. 
You will sometimes see the shy figure of an old car- 
dinal taking his walk there; and if you follow him, 
you will come upon a broad alley of ilexes, lined with 
broken statues, broken friezes, and arched over by 
fantastically twisted branches, brown and interlaced, 
on which the blue-grey leaves hang delicately like 
lace; an alley leading to what must once have been 
a sarcophagus, covered, on the side by which you 
approach it, with white carved figures. On the 
other side you find yourself in a little trellised circle, 
from which, as through a window suddenly opened, 
you see the Alban hills; there is a rustic wooden 
seat against the stone of the sarcophagus, on which, 
roughly carved, two lions meet and seem to shake 
hands, and above is written: ''Qui San Filippo Neri 
discorreva coi suoi discepoli delle cose di Dio." 

Just as I love the gardens of the Villa Mattel, so, 
for much the same reason, I love certain old churches 
and cloisters, which, hidden away in quiet corners, 
exhale, like a faint perfume, a sense of peace and of 
desolation in so singular a union. I am never tired 
of the Pace, the Church of Peace, which nestles 
against the Anima, the Church of the Soul, in a poor 
central part of the city. And it is not for the Sibyls 
of Raphael, admirable in grace of invention as they 
are, that I go to it, but partly for the frescoes of 
Baldassare Peruzzi, on the opposite wall, their 
strength, their gracious severity, their profound 



ROME 47 

purity, and partly for something in the narrow com- 
pass, the dim colours, of the church itself, which seem 
to make it, not in name only, the Church of Peace. 
And in the midst of the Trastevere, with its high 
mouldering walls, its desolate open spaces, its yel- 
low tortuous alleys, and half -fallen houses laid open 
against the road, one comes upon certain churches 
each of which has its own appeal. There is San 
Crisogono, Madame Gervaisais' church, big, rect- 
angular, railed off from the world, with its vast dim 
emptiness, very restful as I have seen it at Vespers, 
mostly in shadow, a broad band of light showing, at 
one end, the white-robed priests, the dark shawls of 
old women, the children running to and fro over the 
floor, while one hears the pathetic little organ now 
before and now behind the voices which sing quaver- 
ing responses. There is the basilica of Santa Maria 
in Trastevere, with its precious mosaics, standing 
aside from the yellow emptiness of the square. There 
is the church which had been the house of St. Cecilia, 
in which you see the white plaintive marble figure 
of the martyr lying under the altar, in a delicate 
attitude, as if in sleep, with that ineffectual gash 
along the slim neck; the monastery with its little 
upper room in which St. Francis of Assisi had lived, 
and where the old, half -blind, simple-minded monk 
shows you the famous portrait and the fragments of 
the saint's clothing. There is the monastery of San 
Cosimato, now an almshouse for old people, with its 
adorable unknown Pinturicchio, its august carved 



48 ROME 

tombs underfoot, its mouldering cloister, in which 
precious marbles lie about like refuse; its ragged 
garden, which has grown green over one knows not 
what wealth of buried treasures; linen hanging to 
dry, old men and women moving slowly with bent 
backs: all this pathetic casual mingling of ruined 
magnificence and the decrepit old age of people 
living on charity, how expressive of Rome it is, 
and how curiously it completes one's sense of that 
desolation which is, as Shelley found it, ** a delicate 
thing"! 

And in all these rich churches in the midst of 
very poor people, all with at least their bit of precious 
marble, their fresco, their one fine picture, there is 
something which appeals to yet another sentiment ; 
for, opening as they desire the gates of heaven to 
the poor, do they not certainly open the gates of that 
heaven on earth which is art? When I go into one 
of these churches and see how poor or humble or 
distressed people have come into them for the relief 
of rest, and when, as I sit there, certainly with no 
devout thoughts, I feel the gradual descent all 
around me of an atmosphere of repose, which seems 
to shut one off, as with invisible wings, from the 
agitations of the world, the busy trivialities of one's 
own mind, all the little, active hindrances to one's 
own possession of one's self, I realise how well the 
Catholic Church has understood the needs of that 
humanity to which she has set herself to minister, 
and how medicinal a place she must always have in 



ROME 49 

the world's course, if no longer as a tonic, still as 
the most soothing, the most necessary, of narcotics. 

XI 

There are certain hours, there is something in 
the aspect of certain places, churches, or gardens, in 
which it seems to me that Bernini has interpreted 
more of the soul of Rome than we are apt or anxious 
to suppose. All that is florid, not quite sincere, un- 
fairly spectacular, in the aspect of the city is summed 
up for me in the four Doctors of the Church, in 
black and white marble, who lean around the chair 
of Peter in St. Peter's, and in the ten loose-limbed 
angels (done after Bernini's designs) who balance 
themselves against an unfelt wind on the balustrades 
of the Ponte Sant' Angelo. What is more subtle in 
this same not quite sincere aiming after effect comes 
out in the languid St. Sebastian, in the church of 
that name on the way to the Catacombs, his white 
marble flesh pierced by gilt arrows, lying elegantly 
in his violent death; about which, indeed, the 
modern custodians of the church have set a whole 
array of painted card-board dolls, a very rag-fair. 
But subtler still, more intimately expressive of that 
part of the religious sentiment which must inevitably, 
in so ecclesiastical a city, come to complete, on the 
world's side, whatever is profane, sensuous, artificial, 
in the idea of devotion to the immaculate Virgin, is 
the Santa Teresa in the Church of S. Maria della 



50 ROME 

Vittoria. The saint, who has the fine hands of a 
patrician lady, Hes in an attitude of sharp, luxurious, 
almost active abandonment, the most sensual atti- 
tude I have ever seen in stone ; her eyes are upturned, 
under their heavy lids, to where a stream of golden 
rays falls upon her, a new Danae, while a young and 
smiling angel stands above her, about to pierce her 
heart with the arrow of divine love. 

But if there are certain moods in which Bernini 
and his Rome seem to one the true Rome, there are 
others in which a deeper simplicity seems to indicate 
what is, after all, deeper in the heart of the city, as 
in some charming piece of unconscious poetry (super- 
stition, if you like to call it so) ,such as the benediction 
of horses on the day of San Antonio Thaumaturgo. 
I love all superstitions, for I have never yet found 
one which did not come out of something which was 
once pure poetry. They are the people's heritage 
of poetry, and to believe them is to have, at all 
events, something of the mood, the mental attitude 
to which alone poetry can appeal. I spent some 
time on the steps of the Church of San Eusebio on 
that day of the benediction of horses, and I re- 
member one very rough and wild-looking country- 
man and his son, who drove up in a little homely cart, 
a foal trotting by the side of the mare. The man got 
down and waited, looking up anxiously, his cap in 
his hand, until the priest came out with his card of 
printed Latin and his gilt sprinkler, and blessed the 
horses in the name of the Father and the Son and 



ROME 51 

the Holy Ghost; then the countryman put on his 
cap with satisfaction, got into his cart, and drove off, 
not knowing that he had been unconsciously living 
a piece of poetry. 

On another day, about Christmas, I saw the 
Presepe in that church of the Aracoeli (its altar 
indeed near heaven) which has throned itself higher 
even than the Capitol, upon which it looks down 
from above its ladder-like steps, on which, if you see 
them from below, people seem to be gliding down a 
celestial staircase without moving their feet as they 
pass from stair to stair. The lighted manger, as I 
entered the dim church, was shown suddenly as the 
sliding-doors were drawn back; and a priest, going 
up into the midst of the painted dolls, took the 
Bambino, a chubby red infant made of coarsely 
daubed w^ood, his robes all golden and bejewelled, 
out of his mother's arms, and carried him through 
the church to the vestry, where he was held in front 
of the altar to have his foot kissed. Women and 
children crowded about him, smiling and pleased, 
seeing what was droll, and at the same time the 
poetry of the symbol. There I saw another side of 
the religious element in Rome, the Christ of simple 
women, of little children, as that sprinkling of the 
horses had been the religion, centred in his beasts, 
of the peasant, and the Bernini saint, in her ecstasy 
of abandonment to the divine love, the patroness of 
Roman boudoirs. 



52 ROME 

XII 

In a toy-shop in the Via Nazionale there is on 
one side a Hfe-sized waxen clown dressed in red, who 
winks his eyes, and taps with his hand on the win- 
dow; on the other side is a little waxen clown, 
seated, dressed in green, who holds on his lap a pig 
with a napkin round his neck. He holds a piece 
of meat in his hand, and the pig looks at it and puts 
out his tongue. Then the clown shrugs his shoulders, 
taps on the ground with one foot, and again holds 
out the piece of meat to the pig, who licks it with 
his tongue, when the clown again draws back the 
piece of meat, shrugs his shoulders, and taps his foot 
again. There never was anything more ingenious of 
its kind, and every one who passes the window stops 
in front of the two clowns and the pig. It seems to 
me that in this puerile mechanical ingenuity I see 
modern Rome as the Romans would like to make it, 
as they have made it whenever they have had the 
chance. That Rome should be a living city rather 
than a museum of antiquities is one of its special 
charms; and thus it is that Rome, in which all the 
ages are at home and jostle one another, is, more 
than any other city, a world in miniature. But 
Rome adapts itself less than most cities to all the 
unsightly economies and hurried facilities of modern 
progress. The Italian of to-day, the Italian in whose 
hands is the civic power, has resolved that his capital, 
which he knows to be the most historically interest- 



ROME 53 

ing capital in the world, shall compete with all the 
young, pushing commercial capitals on their ow^n 
lines, which fortunately it can never do. He has 
set electric trams running past Trajan's Forum, and 
through narrow and crowded streets where they are 
an absolute danger. A little while ago he planned 
to surround the Forum with a gilt railing, but he 
had not the money to do it. He has put a hideous 
iron bridge across the Tiber close to the Ponte Sant' 
Angelo. He has built a gas-manufactory in the very 
midst of ancient Rome, and poisoned the air all 
round. He has cut down the secular cypresses of 
the Villa Ludovisi, and, indeed, all the trees he could 
lay his axe upon. But he has propped up every 
falling stone, and every stone is falling, of the house 
of the Anguillaras in the Trastevere, because Count 
Anguillara was the enemy of a Pope. 

Modern Roman feeling, which, since the events of 
1870, has been somewhat assertively patriotic, has 
certainly little sympathy for the Church. Has it, or 
has it not, left the hearts of the people, remaining 
but as a tradition, a bowing of the head before the 
passing of God, a lifting of the hat before the passing 
of death? Are the priests, after all, making the 
laws of a city w^hich is in the hands of the enemy? 
At all events, the Church is still able very impres- 
sively to disregard what may be only a temporary 
alienation. Walking one day from the Via Sistina 
towards the Villa Medici, along that gracious height 
which overlooks all Rome, and thinking of the very 



54 ROME 

temporal grandeur of what lay there before me, I 
saw a young priest walking rapidly to and fro on the 
flat roof of a house, his eyes fixed on his breviary, 
never raising them to consider the splendour of the 
city. He seemed to me to typify the serene, un- 
thinking, and, because immaterial, invincible power 
of the Church, throned there over what she does 
not always even trouble to understand, so certain is 
she that a power founded on faith is the master 
of material things, and must always remain, even 
in secret, even unacknowledged, even against men's 
will, their master. 

XIII 

Nothing in Rome is so great, nothing so admirable, 
as the continuity and persistence of its life; which 
renews itself incessantly, through change, destruc- 
tion, and the "improvements" of all the ages. To- 
day Rome is alive, and it contains, without confusion, 
the still living ruins of every age known to history. 
No other city harmonises so easily things elsewhere 
incongruous, and I find to-day nothing necessarily 
incongruous in any part of its existence. It is still 
the capital of Italy, the King and the Pope live in it 
side by side, there are soldiers and priests, colleges 
and shops, and the strangers who come to it on pil- 
grimage find something very different from the mu- 
seum of archeology and of the fine arts which they 
may have looked to find. 



ROME 55 

Yet, in this persistence of the national life, it is 
curious how much more evident are the vices than the 
virtues of their ancestors in, at all events, the public 
performances of the modern Romans. The ancient 
Romans were among the great builders of the world, 
and much of what they built still remains hardly the 
worse for wear after nearly two thousand years. The 
modern Romans still build, and would still build, if 
they could, in the grand manner, and with the old 
stability. The bridge which crosses the Tiber to the 
island, the Pons Fabricius or Ponte Quattro Capi, 
the most solid and the most elegant bridge in Rome, 
has its builder's name and the date of its building, 
B. C. 62, still legibly engraved on both sides of each 
arch. The Ponte Margherita, which leads from the 
Piazza del Popolo to the other side of the river, has 
already, in its fifteen years of existence, had to be 
repaired. Less than thirty years ago an embank- 
ment was made along both sides of the Tiber ; it has 
turned a living river into a canal suffocated betw^een 
prison walls, and the first serious flood has broken 
a gap in it. A vast building, which is to be the Law 
Courts, is rising, '* a ghost in marble," to use a phrase 
of Coleridge, an ominous, hideous, unescapable ghost, 
which will blast a whole region of Rome. A monu- 
ment to Vittorio Emanuele is being built with a 
steady waste of years and money, as yet hardly to 
be calculated; and this monument will buffet and 
overhang the sight in the very midst of the city, as 
the man and horse of the Garibaldi statue stamp 



56 ROME 

their pattern on the sky, Uke a placard hung high 
enough at last. 

And the Romans follow their ancestors, with a like 
difference, in another and even worse fashion. The 
whole history of Rome has been a series of transposi- 
tions, from the brick which Augustus left marble, 
and the Haussmannisation of Nero, to the cutting 
of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. In all these changes, 
for better or for worse, the old has been destroyed 
to make way for the new. During the Middle Ages, 
and right into the Renaissance, Pagan buildings 
were merely quarries for Christian churches and the 
palaces of nobles. Now and then the plunder was 
used to some purpose, and the travertine of the Colos- 
seum helped to build the Cancellaria and the Farnese 
Palace. But now, when respect for ancient monu- 
ments is accepted in principle, and when the principle 
is put into practice by the tidying of the Forum and 
by the barrier of the lira which keeps the casual 
vagabond out of its enclosure, whatever is destroyed 
is destroyed deliberately, inexcusably. No excuse, 
but that of money-making or of the most trivial 
material convenience, has ever been offered for the 
destruction of the Villa Ludovisi, for the encroach- 
ment on the Campagna by the building of factories 
and of tenements, for the gas-works of the Circus 
Maximus, for the contemplated destruction of part 
of the Castel S. Angelo in order to widen a road 
which is already as wide as most of the streets of 
Rome. This is not the first time that the conven- 



ROME 57 

ience of the people has been set before the preserva- 
tion of so eminently national a monument. Part 
of the fortifications were removed some twenty 
years ago; unnecessarily even then. In all these 
petty larcenies upon the property of the world, 
nothing has been gained, everything lost; for of 
what consequence is it to any one that two cardinals 
may drive abreast from the Ponte Margherita to the 
Vatican, or that the latest bevy of Cook's tourists 
may sit down to dinner on the exact spot where the 
gardens of Sallust had delighted the Romans for 
nearly the whole of the Christian Era? 

The modern Roman has tw^o passions, which we 
can express in English by a single word : edification. 
He has the mania of building vast edifices, and he has 
the mania of turning his building to some edifying 
purpose. In the monument to Vittorio Emanuele 
and in the Garibaldi statue both are combined; 
in the Law Courts, in the Gallery of Modern Art, in 
the Banca d' Italia, we find the passion for what is 
big; in the ''busts of distinguished Italians" which 
''embellish," as Baedeker says "the various walks" 
of the Pincio, we find the passion for what is edifying. 

Image-worship has always had its seat in Rome, 
and the statues to Vittorio Emanuele and to Gari- 
baldi are the legitimate lineage of the statues which 
were first set up to the gods of Paganism and then to 
the saints of Christianity. The Roman must have 
something visible to worship, and it is the sculptor's 
art, with its noble pomp, its publicity, that has always 



58 ROME 

most pleased him. First he worshipped images of 
force, then images of mercy, and now he again 
worships images of force. He has drawn his deities 
nearer to him, he has chosen them out of his own 
streets, he has exalted them that he may exalt him- 
self in them. The instinct is the same, only the form 
changes. 

The Romans have still the choice of unparalleled 
sites, and they have lost none of their old skill in 
choice. From the Janiculum one sees all Rome; 
one sees the Janiculum from almost every quarter 
of Rome. Tasso's oak is there, and the garden of the 
eighteenth century Academy of the Arcadians, and 
the Villa Lante ; and there, on the highest point of the 
hill, once wooded with old and lovely oaks, the eques- 
trian statue of Garibaldi has been set up. The base 
stands a Httle woodenly, all four legs set square, the 
rider at least sits steady; but around the base are 
fretful groups in bronze : on two sides peaceful sym- 
bolism, and on two sides fighting men with plumes 
and guns and sabres and revolvers and bugles and 
knapsacks. By the roadside on the way down to 
Acqua Paola there are busts in top-hats and military 
caps ; and these, which no one can mistake for orna- 
ment, are put there, I suppose, for purposes of edifi- 
cation, like the busts of distinguished Italians which 
embellish the various walks of the Pincio. 

The great men of the Pincio range from Julius 
Caesar to Daniele Manin ; they are put there, I sup- 
pose, in order that the Roman youth of to-day, as 



ROME 59 

he takes the air on the most delightful promenade in 
Europe, may think of the great men to whom his 
country has given birth, and that he may be stirred to 
emulation. Great men or mediocrities, they are re- 
presented in these shameless busts with an unvary- 
ing and irritating inanity. They cannot be ignored : 
the bald head and frizzled locks pose and flutter for 
attention; the names cry from the pedestals; one 
is continually distracted from what is peaceful and 
renewing in this high garden which looks over Rome. 
Is it possible, I ask myself, that the Roman youth 
of to-day can be so greedy of edification, so destitute 
of artistic sensibility, as to derive the proper improv- 
ing thrill from what should do no more than shock 
his artistic sense? 

The artistic sense: it is there that the modern 
Roman is lacking. What the ancient Roman did he 
desires to do ; only the essential thing is not there, the 
sense of proportion, of beauty, of taste, the artistic 
sense. 

Between the Capitol and the Piazza Venezia, 
partly hidden by walls and hoardings, there can be 
seen vast irregular substructures of stone-work al- 
ready in parts lined with white marble, in the form 
of what seems to be a large modern house, with doors 
and windows ; everywhere big doors leading nowhere, 
and narrow windows through which no one will ever 
look. The hinder part of the structure is as yet left 
plain, but the front and sides are clamped and em- 
bossed with irrelevant and mediocre decoration. At 



6o ROME 

each comer there is stuck a composite blob of orna- 
ment in which a garland of palm-leaves seems to 
support a cluster of Roman breastplates, shields, 
and helmets. Other blobs, with discs containing 
winged heads, are slung to the flat part of the wall 
by marble ribbons; here and there are brocades of 
scroll-work and foliage, and the cornices of the win- 
dows are teased into flowery patterns. Fluted 
columns with ornamentations of palm-leaves spring- 
ing from the bases support I know not what, and a 
few trivial nude figures are carved on flat pillars 
dividing the windows. 

This house, as it seems, this immense and mean 
house, is no more than the base for the gigantic mon- 
ument to Vittorio Emanuele, which has got no fur- 
ther after twenty years' labour upon it. There is to 
be an equestrian statue on the summit, when all 
is done, and some two millions of pounds have been 
spent; but no one knows much about the statue, for 
the sculptor who was to have done it is dead, and the 
statue is still to make. In preparing the ground for 
the monument some mischief has already been done, 
but the most serious part of the mischief is only as 
yet decided on. One corner of the Piazza Venezia 
is made by the angle of the Palazzo Venezia and of 
what is known as the Palazzetto, a smaller and lower 
but not less beautiful wing of this palace, and this 
palace is the only example of the finer early Renais- 
sance which exists in Rome. The Palazzetto is to 
be pulled down, and it is to be pulled down not even 



ROME 6r 

because the space of ground occupied is wanted 
for part of the structure of this monument, but in 
order that the monument may be properly seen 
from the other end of the Corso. Protests have 
been raised in Rome, even by the Romans, against 
this wanton and ridiculous act of vandalism; but it 
appears that the protests are to be disregarded, 
and that a beautiful building of the fifteenth century 
is to be pulled down to make a peep-hole for one of 
the earliest abortions of the twentieth century. 

For this monument which comes shouldering 
into Rome like a hulking parvenu, there can be no 
excuse of need, or even of utility, nor indeed any 
excuse for intruding upon the society of his betters. 
Here is a poor country, with still untold treasures 
buried where every spade may reach them, and 
there is not money enough to keep the spades digging. 
And here are millions being poured out and heaped 
up for the building of a monument which is neither 
a palace nor a church nor a museum nor a thea- 
tre, nor an)rthing capable of human or divine uses; 
not even, as the Pyramids were, a tomb. The Law 
Courts, which are being built on the other side of the 
river, can scarcely bear the reproach of being useless. 
What building in a city can be more important than 
a building in which the law is administered ? Thirty 
millions of francs is a large price to pay for utility 
and impressiveness, but let us see if the second result, 
as well as the first, is answered. 

Imagine a long and low building with a flat roof, 



62 ROME 

and on the flat roof a village of small houses. The 
doorway and the centre of the front are still covered 
with scaffolding, and not wholly to be made out, 
though it seems that the main part of the ornamen- 
tation is to be reserved for them. But, looking over 
the rest of the building, one observ^es ornamentation 
everywhere and nowhere good ornamentation. There 
are pillars bandaged and bolstered, supporting 
cornices of many styles, culminating in a drove of 
tightly-packed bulls' heads, linked by garlands; 
everywhere garlands, fat garlands tied by ribbons, 
and above them, hanging by ribbons from imitation 
nails, medallions with foolish historic heads. Every- 
where there are angles, knobs, twiddles of stone; not 
an arch is allowed to curve freely, not a pillar to 
spring straight from its base, not a window ledge to 
remain plain. And, in front of this tortured and 
trivial and formidable edifice, as if in silent and unre- 
garded criticism of what is pretentious and ineffectual 
in it, a slender framework of black and ribbed scaf- 
folding makes a stately and dignified pattern. 

I wish to guard myself from even a momentary 
injustice, and it would be unjust to say that the 
Romans have not done skilfully what they have 
chosen, and perhaps, in a sense, been obliged to do, 
in the engineering of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele 
and of the tunnel of the Via Milano, and that they 
have not built at least one considerable building with 
an unusual sense of symmetry and even of restraint. 
Every piece of ornamentation on the Banca d' Italia 



ROME 63 

is bad, but, in proportion to its size, how remarkably 
little ornamentation there is! The Art Gallery 
in the same street, with its vaults and pillars, its 
friezes, its gentlemen posed against the sky in all 
the discomfort of stone, is there, not far off, rhetori- 
cal and complacent; and is but one more instance 
of that lack in Rome of the artistic sense, of the mere 
element of taste, which we see more fundamentally 
in the setting of the boxers of Canova among the 
antique sculpture of the Vatican, and in the careful 
preservation in the Palace of the Conservatori of the 
sixteenth-century infants, who bring so sharp a dis- 
cord into the severe and admirable harmony of the 
Capitoline wolf of the fifth century before Christ. 

It is, I have already said, the great charm of Rome 
that it should be still alive and still at the head of a 
nation. I am prepared to admit the necessity of 
main thoroughfares, the perhaps pardonable conven- 
ience of electric trams, and it is clear that as the 
population increases some sort of housing must be 
devised for this increase ; cheap fiats must, no doubt, 
be built for poor people ; but why need these hideous 
buildings be put up precisely where there is most to 
spoil in the natural aspect of things? Only a little 
while ago the country around the Piazza of S. Gio- 
vanni in Laterano and the country around the Porta 
S. Lorenzo were masterpieces of nature and of that 
art which comes with age and ruin. To-day both 
are disfigured by mean and cheap buildings, already 
squalid, and the incomparable Campagna is driven 



64 ROME 

yet further from the gates. The beauty of Rome, let 
it never be forgotten, dwindles by every step that 
the Campagna withdraws from it; and, for Rome, 
beauty is force, existence itself. So far, during so 
many centuries Rome has always, by a natural 
magic in its hills, its air, its sky, triumphed over 
every outrage of its enemies or of its citizens. Will 
it always continue to do so? is the question which one 
asks oneself, not too hopefully. It has had to fight 
against many barbarians, but never against so for- 
midable a barbarism as the great modern barbarism, 
part vulgarity, part pretentiousness, part incompe- 
tence, which calls itself progress. 

XIV 

What is subtlest in Rome must always reveal 
itself to strangers, and not to the Romans; for the 
modern Roman is given over to the desire and 
admiration of material things, and what is subtlest 
in Rome appeals to the soul, perhaps I should say, 
rather, to the mind. Since I lived in Rome I 
have come to find both London and Paris, in them- 
selves, a little provincial: for I find them occupied 
with less eternal things, or with less of the immediate 
message of eternal things speaking in them, than 
this liberating Rome. Rome, properly apprehended 
(and to apprehend it properly it needs only that you 
are not without a certain intelligence, and that you 
remain passive to your impressions), seems to shut 



ROME 65 

one in, as with its own walls, upon the greatest 
moments that have been in the world; upon the 
greatest moments of art, of history, of religion, of 
humanity. It is not merely that they are there; 
you cannot escape them. Every road does not lead 
to Rome, but every road in Rome leads to eternity. 
It is quietly prodigal of itself, like the air about one 
which is part of one's breath. In this large Rome 
one has room for one's self; within these walls one 
is shut in from others, and from what in oneself is 
the reflection of their image; one's energies are not 
torn into little ineffectual pieces, as they are in the 
rapid drawing this way and that of the daily life of 
all other great cities. One has time to discover 
that, while there are many interesting and even 
intoxicating things in the world, there are very few 
things of primary importance. It is like the opening 
of a great door. This opening of a door, in front 
of which one has passed constantly without even 
seeing that it was shut, is the moment for which 
every other moment in life was but an unconscious 
waiting; every moment which follows will re- 
member it. For the most part this door is but 
opened and then shut suddenly, before our eyes 
have become well accustomed to the unfamiliar 
light in which we discern, it may be, familiar objects. 
It is not often that the door is held steadily open as 
long as we choose to look through it. But that is 
what happens in Rome. 

In London I am too close to a multitude of in- 



66 ROME 

teresting trifles, of attractive people, of opportunities 
for the satisfaction of every desire. To will and to 
receive are, in London, simultaneous. Daily life is 
too importunate in thrusting upon me whatever for 
an idle or perverse or estimable moment I have 
hankered after. There are too many people, too 
many books, too many museums, too many theatres ; 
the spectacle of this feverish, unslackening life is 
too absorbing. I cannot escape the newspapers; 
for even if I do not read them, there is always some 
one to tell me what they have been saying of my 
own or my friend's last book. I cannot help 
sometimes asking myself what will be the immediate, 
urban effect of something which I have written; 
and it is a little humiliating to find oneself in so 
trivial a mental attitude, which it would be difficult 
to preserve in front of the Pantheon or of the Colos- 
seum. And, above all, I have not time to live. 
Life scatters into waves all over the rocks, falling 
back broken and dispersed into the seething trouble 
of the ocean. Yesterday is to-day, and to-day to- 
morrow, before I have been alone with myself for an 
hour. That canopy of smoke which London has 
set up between itself and the sky imprisons me, day 
by day, with the debris of each day. I forget that 
an3rthing else exists. 

In Paris, frankly, I am too much at home, too 
happy; I require too little; life is too easy, and 
answers too readily to the demands of the senses. 
And Paris, which frees me from one conventionality, 



ROME 67 

imposes upon me another. Because the flesh is an 
honourable part of the human constitution, and 
Hberty an honourable prerogative of the citizen, it 
does not follow that a permissible exemption should 
become a precept, a very prejudice. And that is 
just the provinciality of that bright, youthful, in- 
spiriting, and seductive Paris which I love so much 
and in which I find it, after all, more nearly possible 
to be myself than in London ; for Paris is not merely 
the city of the senses, but the city of ideas, the ideas 
of pure reason. 

But Rome has freed me from both these tyran- 
nies, the tyranny of the senses and of the ideas 
of pure reason. It neither absorbs me too much in 
material things nor forces me into too rapid mental 
conclusions. So much of the world's history lies 
about here, in these stones, like a part of nature, 
and with so far more significant a meaning than in 
the mere picturesque heaping of natural forces. 
Empires have lived and died here; the great spir- 
itual empire of the Western world still has its 
seat upon the seven hills; here are all the kingdoms 
of art; and is it possible to find anywhere a more 
intimate message than in these voices, in this 
eloquent Roman silence? 

Winter, 1896, 1904. 



VENICE 



69 



VENICE 
I 

Coming in the train from Milan, we seemed, for 
the last ten minutes, to be rushing straight into 
the sea. On each side was water, nothing but 
water, stretching out vaguely under the pale evening 
light; and at first there was not a sign of land 
ahead. Then a wavering line, with dark ships, 
and thin shafts of rigging, came out against the 
horizon, like the first glimpse of an island; the 
line broadened, lights began to leap, one after 
another, out of the darkness, and a great ware- 
house, glowing like a furnace, grew up solidly out 
of the water. We were in Venice. 

I had never been in Venice before, and in the 
excitement of the moment I resolved that I would 
find my way to St. Mark's on foot, through the 
labyrinth of streets and bridges, in which I did not 
even know whether to turn to the right or to the 
left, for I had lost my guide-book in changing 
trains at Bale. It seemed to me amusing to trust 
myself to the attraction of the centre, and I set 
out confidently, following as far as I could the main 

71 



72 VENICE 

stream of people. I walked fast, plunging deeper 
and deeper into unknown ways, which were like 
nothing I had ever seen, turning now to right, now 
to left, crossing the bridges, with their long, low 
comfortable steps, seeing the black flash of a gon- 
dola round a sudden corner, under me, and down 
the vanishing waterway between tall houses with 
carved balconies and stone steps rising out of the 
water; turning down narrow alleys, where two 
people could only just \^alk abreast, alleys which 
broadened all at once into great empty squares, 
a rococo church in one corner, a fifteenth-century 
palace in another; then a wider alley, in which 
bright crowds were buying and selling out of bril- 
liantly coloured shops, women in vivid shawls, 
walking superbly, men in beautiful rags lounging 
against the w^all and lying in doorways ; then another 
grey square, a glimpse, in the opening between 
two houses, of gondolas lying in the water, between 
the tall stakes of a ferry ; and then again the narrow 
and dim alleys. I went on and on, turning back, 
trying another alley, and still the endless alleys 
seemed to reach out before me, and the bright 
crowds grew thinner and thinner: endless!/ and 
was I really going farther and farther away? I 
began to wonder, and I turned back, half way up 
a narrow street, and asked the way to the Piazza. 
Straight on, they told me, up that very street, a few 
steps ; and all at once, going a few steps beyond 
the point at which I had turned back, I found 



VENICE 73 

myself suddenly free of all that coil of entang- 
ling alleys, which had seemed to be tightening 
about me like a snake; I came out into a great 
space, seeing for the first time a clear breadth of 
sky, and there, against the sky, was St Mark's. 

I was glad to see Venice for the first time by 
night, and to come into it in just this casual fashion. 
A place has almost the shyness of a person, with 
strangers; and its secret is not to be surprised by 
a too direct interrogation. A guide-book is a 
necessary evil; but it is not when I have had a 
guide-book in my hand that I have received my 
lasting impressions. I have spent weeks in the 
churches of Venice, climbing upon ladders and 
propping myself against altars, and lying on my 
back on benches, to look at pictures; and I have 
learnt many things about Tintoretto, and Bellini, 
and Carpaccio, and Tiepolo, which I could have 
learnt in no other way. But what I have learnt 
about Venice, Venice as a person, has come to me 
more or less unconsciously, from living on the 
Zattere, where I could see the masts of ships and 
the black hulls of barges, whenever I looked out 
of my windows on the canal of the Giudecca; from 
sitting night after night outside a cafe in the Piazza, 
listening to the military band, watching people 
pass, thinking of nothing, only singularly content 
to be there; from strolling night after night down 
to the promontory of the Dogana, and looking 
into the darkness of the water, watching a man 



74 VENICE 

catching fish in a net like a shrimping net, while the 
sound of the mandolins and of the voices of singers 
who sat in lantern-lighted gondolas outside the 
windows of the hotels on the Grand Canal came to 
me in a double chorus, crossing one another in a 
strange, not inharmonious confusion of tunes; and 
especially from the Lido, that long, narrow bank 
between the lagoon and the Adriatic, to whose sea- 
ward side I went so often, merely to be there, on the 
sand beyond the bathing-huts, watching the quiet- 
ude of the sea. On the horizon there would be a 
long, tall line of fishing-boats, their red sails flash- 
ing against the pearl grey of the sky like the painted 
wings of great moths, spread for flight; as you gazed 
at them, they seemed to stand there motionless ; then, 
as you looked away for a moment and looked back 
again, one of them would have vanished suddenly, 
as if it had gone down into the sea. And the water, 
which rippled so gently against the sand at my feet, 
had something of the gentleness of colour of that 
water which wanders about the shores of Ireland. 
It shone, and seemed to grow whiter and whiter, 
as it stretched out towards the horizon, where the 
fishing-boats stood up in their long, tall line against 
the sky; it had the delicacy, the quietude of the 
lagoon, with, in those bright sails, the beckoning of 
a possible escape from the monotony of too ex- 
quisite things. 



VENICE 75 

II 

Venice has been sentimentalised by the German 
and by the young lady of all nations. Lovers have 
found its moonlight and its water more expressive 
than the moonlight and the water of any other shore. 
Byron, Musset, Wagner, Browning, have lived and 
died there. It has been painted by every painter. 
It has become a phrase, almost as meaningless as 
Arcadia. And indeed it is difficult to think of 
Venice as being quite a real place, its streets of 
water as being exactly real streets, its gondolas as 
being no more than the equivalent of hansoms, its 
union of those elsewhere opposed sentiments of the 
sea, the canal, the island, walled and towered land, 
as being quite in the natural order of things. I had 
had my dreams of Venice, but nothing I had dreamed 
was quite as impossible as what I found. That first 
night, as I looked at the miraculous, many-coloured 
fagade of St. Mark's, the pale, faintly-tinged marble 
of the Doge's Palace, I seemed, after all, not to have 
left London, but to be still at the Alhambra, watch- 
ing a marvellous ballet, and, as it pleases me to 
be, in the very midst of it, among the glittering 
''properties," knocking at every step against some 
fragment of delicately unreal scenery, losing none of 
the illusion by being so close to its framework. The 
Doge's Palace looked exactly like beautifully painted 
canvas, as if it were stretched on frames, and ready 
to be shunted into the wings for a fresh "set" to 



76 VENICE 

come forward. Yes, it is difficult to believe in Venice 
raost of all when one is in Venice. 
^ I do not understand why any one paints Venice, 
and yet every one who paints, paints Venice. But to 
do so is to forget that it is itself a picture, a finished, 
conscious work of art. You cannot improve the 
picture as it is, you can add nothing, you need 
arrange nothing. Ever3rthing has been done, awaits 
you, enchants you, paralyses you; the artistic effect 
of things as they are is already complete: it leaves, 
or should leave you, if you have artistic intentions 
upon it, helpless. Mere existence, at Venice, be- 
comes at once romantic and spectacular: it is like 
living in a room without a blind, in the full sunlight. 
A realist, in Venice, would become a romantic, by 
mere faithfulness to what he saw before him. People 
are always saying in Venice, "What a picture that 
would make!" but the things of which people say 
that are just the things in which nature, time, art, 
and chance have already made pictures, have already 
done all that the artist should be left to do for him- 
self : they remain for the photographer. The only 
chance, it seems to me, for the artist in Venice is to 
realise frankly that, in this water which seems to 
exist in order that it may set off the delicacy 
and slimness and fine decoration of architecture 
which on land w^ould appear to have lost the 
key of its harmony, in this architecture which 
seems to have grown up out of the water in order 
that it may be a flower on the surface of the 



VENICE ^^ 

water, he is painting the scenery of a masque or 
ballet. 

And yet, after all, but perhaps it will only deepen 
your impression of that unreality which is Venice, 
the masque or ballet, you will soon find, is over. 
The scenery is still there, the lights have been left 
on; only the actors, the dancers, are gone. That is 
one element of the melancholy which is an element 
in the charm of Venice; but a certain sadness is 
inherent in the very sound and colour of still water, 
and a little of the melancholy which we now feel 
must always have been a background of shadow, 
even at the most splendid moment of the masque. 
Now, when art and commerce, the Doges and the 
galleys, have alike drifted into the past; when the 
great squares are too large for the largest crowds 
that are ever to be found in them, and the great 
palaces, too large for their owners, are passing into 
the hands of Jews and Americans ; when the tracery 
of Renaissance windows looks out between broken 
glass and roughly fixed boards, and the balustrades 
of balconies moulder and wear away under the 
dripping of clothes hung over them to dry; when 
this city of carnivals and masked balls, Goldoni's, 
Longhi's, is asleep by midnight, it may well seem 
as if silence and desolation have descended on it like 
a cloud. Why is it then that the melancholy of 
Venice is the most exquisite melancholy in the 
world? It is because that melancholy is no nearer 
to one's heart than the melancholy in the face of a 



78 VENICE 

portrait. It is the tender and gracious sadness of 
that beautiful woman who leans her face upon her 
hands in a famous picture in the Accademia. The 
feast is over, the wine still flushes the glass on the 
table, the little negro strikes his lute, she listens to 
the song, her husband sits beside her, proudly: 
something not in the world, a vague thought, a 
memory, a forgetfulness, has possessed her for the 
moment, setting those pensive lines about her lips, 
which have just smiled, and which will smile again 
when she has lifted her eyelids. 

Ill 

All Venice is a piece of superb, barbaric patch- 
work in which the East and the West have an 
equal share. The lion of St. Mark's, his head and 
shoulders in one piece, his hind-quarters in another, 
is a symbol of the construction of Venice, just as 
the bronze horses, which have seen the downfall of 
Nero, the splendours of Constantinople, and, at 
Paris, the First Empire, are a symbol of its history. 
Venice is as near to the East as it is to Italy; you 
are reminded of the East at every step; yet, after 
all, its interest is precisely that it is not Eastern, 
that it is really of the West, and that it has given a 
new touch of the fantastic to the fantasy which we 
call Oriental, an arrangement of lines and colours 
which, in its own country, has a certain air of being 
at home, but which, out of its country, frankly 
admits itself barbaric, a bastard. 



VENICE 79 

In the thirteenth century there was a law which 
obliged every Venetian merchant, coming back from 
a voyage, to bring with him something for the 
adornment of the basilica. Thus it is that St. Mark's 
has come to be one vast mosaic, in which every 
piece of marble is itself a precious thing, perhaps 
brought from the other end of the world, and a kind 
of votive offering. The church is like an immense 
jewel, a piece of goldsmith's work, in which the 
exquisite and the fantastic are carried to so rare a 
beauty, in their elaborate mingling, as to attain 
almost to a perfection in spite of themselves. Unlike 
other great churches, the beauty of St. Mark's is not 
so much structural as in ornament, ornament which 
seems, indeed, to become a part of its very substance. 
It is not for its proportions, for the actual science 
in stone of a Palladio or a Sansovino, that it comes 
to be, in a sense, the most beautiful church in the 
world, but because it has the changing colours of 
an opal, and the soft outlines of a living thing. It 
takes the reflection of every cloud, and, in certain 
lights, flushes into a rose, whitens to a lily. You 
enter, and your feet are upon a pavement which 
stretches away in coloured waves like a sea; over 
your head is a sky of pure gold, a jewelled sky, in 
which the colours and the patterns are the history 
of the whole world. The gold, when the light 
strikes it, glitters in one part like rock-crystal, in 
another like gilt chain armour. Rosy lights play 
upon it, and the very vault dies away in soft fire. 



8o VENICE 

Yet St. Mark's has nothing of the spiritual mysti- 
cism of a Gothic cathedral, any more than it has 
the purely ecclesiastical atmosphere of St. Peter's. 
It is half temple, half mosque; it has the severity of 
an early Christian church, overlaid by the barbaric 
splendours of the East; and its splendours, too, are 
hieratic, in a strange and fantastic hierarchy which 
seems to partake of all the religions, the beginnings 
of Christianity seem visibly building themselves up 
out of the ruins of Paganism; and the rites of the 
Greek Church or of the Catholic would be equally 
in place. It is a church which is also the world, a 
little world into which everything enters; where 
everything that has human beauty, or curiosity, or 
value, is not too beautiful or valuable, and could in 
no way be unsuited, for the divine use. And St. 
Mark's has room, still, for all the world and all the 
churches. Tourists walk about carrying red guide- 
books, and listening to the chatter of guides; old 
people, with handkerchiefs over their heads, twisted 
like turbans, kneel with clasped hands and uncon- 
scious eyes; the High Mass goes on in the choir, 
invisibly, behind the great barrier, through which 
there comes the sound of voices chanting; and, in a 
side chapel, an old priest says his Mass to a few 
devout persons. And nothing seems out of place , the 
devout persons, the priests, the tourists, the largest 
onyx in the world, over the pulpit, the profane 
sumptuousness of African marble, the "majestical 
roof fretted with golden fire"; for here, as every- 



VENICE 8i 

where in Venice, all contradictions seem able to 
exist side by side, in some fantastic, not quite ex- 
plicable, unity of their own. 



IV 



High Mass at St Mark's, as I have seen it at 
Easter and at the feast of St Mark, is somewhat less 
magnificent a ceremony than in most churches; for 
the elevation and seclusion of the choir permit the 
sight of the holy mysteries only to the few who can 
find room inside the screen, or in one of the side 
chapels, or in the galleries. The galleries, indeed, 
give much the best point of view. Looking down 
from that height, you see the priests move through 
their appointed courses, the vestments, the incense 
mounting on the wings of the music, among the 
voices; and the great crowd crawling over the 
pavement, with a continual motion, from the church 
to the Piazza, from the Piazza to the church, set- 
tling down, now and again, into solid groups, like 
the pigeons outside. And indeed the aspect of the 
church is very similar to the aspect of the Piazza. 
It has the same air of space and leisure; it can be 
thronged, yet never appears to be full, and it has the 
same air of belonging to the people. On a festa 
everybody comes in, as naturally as everybody walks 
up and down the Piazza; there is the same bright 
crowd, face for face, shawl for shawl. It is not an 
instinct of devotion; it is habit, and the attraction 

6 



82 VENICE 

of the centre. In Venice all roads lead to the Piazza, 
and the Piazza is but the courtyard of St. Mark's. 
The Piazza di San Marco always gives one an 
impression of space ; yet, put into Trafalgar Square, 
how much room it \vould leave over! The buildings 
on three sides of it, though of different dates, and 
of very different interest as architecture (part of the 
south side being the Library of Sansovino, the finest 
public building in Italy), are all perfectly regular, 
and, at a general view, uniform; yet there is no 
sense of monotony, but rather of a distinguished 
precision, which, in its rich severity, is somehow more 
various than variety itself. And the Piazza, with 
its arcade of shops and cafes, though it is in one 
sense the Rue de Rivoli of Venice, the resort of 
every foreigner, is still, as it always has been, the 
resort of the people, and of all the people. The 
Englishman or the German, though he takes his ice 
at Florian's, or his coffee at the Quadri, like a native, 
is^ after all, only an outside spectator of the really 
Venetian way of taking one's leisure. The first 
time I came into the Piazza, on an afternoon when 
the band was playing, I saw what seemed to me 
either a wedding or a funeral. A procession was 
slowly making its way along, a procession which 
seemed interminable; and, on coming nearer, I found 
that in effect it never ended, for the line returned 
upon itself like the winding line of a farandole, and 
while those nearer to the Procuratie Vecchie were 
always coming from the direction of St. Mark's, those 



VENICE 83 

farther out were always going towards it. The 
order was rarely broken, and the incredible slowness 
of the step was never quickened. It was the public, 
promenade, in which only the costumes have changed 
century after century; not the faces, nor the step, 
nor the drawling line returning upon itself, in which 
all Venice, shawled, bare-headed, bourgeois, aristo- 
cratic, and the carabinieri, imposing, ornamental 
creatures who seem for once in their place, in such a 
procession, take the air together. Another Insur- 
able crowd darkens the terrasse of the cafes, spread- 
ing far out into the Piazza from under the arcades ; 
and around the bandstand in the middle there is yet 
another crowd, standing attentively, while the band 
plays the eternal Verdi, the eternal Ponchielli ; and 
about them, wings wide in the sunlight, the pigeons 
come swooping down, each with his little pink feet 
poised delicately close together, separating just as 
they touch the ground. At night the same prom- 
enade goes on: but the pigeons are sleeping, among 
the carved angels and beside the bronze horses 
of the basilica. Under the gaslight and the clear, 
dark blue of a sky which seems stretched like the 
silk of a velarium, the winding line is denser than 
ever. Little groups are clustered in every corner, 
on every step, on the pedestals of the fiagstaves, on 
the marble slabs of St. Mark's, between the porphyry 
columns, on the marble bench in front of the Log- 
getta. At ten the crowd begins to melt away; 
by eleven, only Florian's and the Quadri have still 



84 VENICE 

their gay, chattering disputants, Httle set by little 
set, each in its own room, or on the chairs outside 
it. But there are still lingerers about the flagstaves, 
before the Loggetta, and in the doorways and arches 
of St. Mark's ; bare-headed women and children, half 
asleep, their bright shawls drawn around them, loung- 
ing so beautifully, in such coloured outline, and with 
such a visible sense of repose. 



The main thoroughfare of Venice, the street of 
shops, which leads from the Piazza ever3rvvhere, is 
the Merceria, which you enter under the clock- 
tower, on which the two bronze gentlemen strike 
the hour with their hammers. After many windings 
it broadens out, just before reaching the Rialto, 
into the Campo San Salvatore, and from that on- 
wards to the Campo San Bartolommeo. From Good 
Friday to Easter Monday there is a sort of little 
fair here, and stalls are set up under the church 
of San Salvatore, and all around the little railing 
within which stands Goldoni's statue. He stands 
there, looking down on the people as if he saw in 
them one of his comedies ; firmly planted, wearing 
his court dress with an air, and with an intensely 
self-satisfied smile of amused interest on his face. 
If he could only turn his head, he would look right 
up the steep, broad stairs of the Rialto, which 
lie there to the right, bright with moving crowds 



VENICE 85 

of colour, winding up and down on each side of the 
central Hne of stalls, between the shops, hung with 
long coloured stripes. He stands there, looking 
down on the people. All around are tall grey houses, 
with shutters of green and pale blue ; one house , in a 
comer, has shutters of an intense blue, which seems 
to soak up and cast back all the sunlight. The stalls 
are but a few boards, hastily set up on trestles ; they 
are hung with bright rows of stockings, necklaces, 
toys, heaped with sweets, and shirts, and shawls; 
some of them are old book-stalls, piled with worthless 
books in all languages, mostly in calf, together with 
numerous little works of gallantry and devotion, all in 
paper ; there is a Fonografico Excelsior, and there are 
glittering copper things, pots and pans, lying all 
over the ground ; and there is a pentagonal kiosque 
of unpainted wood, with little flags flying and paper 
placards stuck across it, at which two women in 
striped blouses, aided by a man, are serving out 
endless tiny cups of coffee, at a halfpenny a cup. 
The cry of "Acqua!" is heard at every moment, 
and the water-carriers pass, with their framework 
of glasses and their covered copper pans of water. 
The men, who stand or sit by the stalls, are all 
smoking. Sometimes they take the cigar from 
their mouths to shout their wares, but for the 
most part they seem indifferent to purchasers; 
especially one old and dirty Jew, with long hair 
and a long beard, who puffs placidly at his pipe 
as he watches the stall of cheap kerchiefs to which 



86 VENICE 

no customer ever comes. I noticed particularly a 
group of five old women, with turbaned heads and 
a century of wrinkles, and another group of eleven 
facchini and beggars, some of whom were very 
old men, with tattered, yet still dignified cloaks, 
huge brigandish hats, their bright red stockings 
showing like an ornament through the gaps in their 
boots. They were terribly dirty; but in Venice, 
where everything has its own way of becoming 
beautiful, dirt, at the right distance, gives a fine 
tone to an old face, like those faces that we see in 
the sketches of Michelangelo, wrinkled like a withered 
apple, tanned to a sombre red, and set in the shadow 
of long grey hair and beard. Dirt, on such a face, 
a kind of weather-stain, has that dignity which 
dirt in England gives to an old ruin. Here the 
old ruin is the beggar-man, and he is not less pic- 
turesque, not less dignified, than any castle in 
England. 



VI 



A part of Venice that I like, not because it is 
attractive in itself, but because it is so unlike the 
show Venice and so like a fishing village, with its 
smell of the sea and ships, is the Via Garibaldi, 
which runs from Veneta Marina past the Public 
Gardens. It is a broad thoroughfare, which I can 
look up and down for some distance, a rare thing 
in Venice; and I have often sat here, intently idle, 



VENICE 87 

watching every one who passes me. All that is 
humbler, more truly indigenous, in Venice, seems 
to pass, at one time or another, along that highway 
between the two main branches of the lagoon, the 
shore which looks towards San Giorgio, the Riva, 
and the shore which looks towards Murano, the 
Fondamenta Nuove. Sailors are always passing, 
and fishermen, with their heavy heelless shoes, and 
fine ruddy-brown knitted stockings, ribbed in cir- 
cular coils, which they wear like top boots; the 
faces here are bronzed to a deeper tone of red 
than in any other quarter except the Giudecca. 
Sometimes a company of soldiers comes marching 
past, in their dark blue great-coats and helmets, 
their drab trousers and gaiters; they walk briskly, 
with the swinging gait of the Itahan soldier. 

The houses are old, and mostly white, with green 
and brown shutters which have faded from the 
crudeness of their original colours, to become a soft 
lilac, a delicate chocolate. There are a few booths 
in the middle of the road, under the little starved 
trees, laid out for the most part with clothes, skirts 
and handkerchiefs, and fruit; the two necessities of 
existence here, bright-coloured things to wear, and 
fruit to eat. A facchino is lying flat on his face, 
asleep, on one of the polished marble benches, his 
vivid blue trousers glittering in the heat of the sun ; 
another facchino leans against a tree, smoking; men, 
women, and children are lying along the walk, 
basking in the sunlight; some of the children are 



88 VENICE 

bare-footed, for the people about here are a little 
more sordid in their poverty than in most parts of 
Venice, though without that air of depression which 
I have noticed in the Canareggio quarter. Two 
little red-shawled children are sitting on a seat 
opposite to me, counting their treasures; groups of 
small people, carrying just slightly smaller babies, 
are resting against the entrance to the gardens. I 
hear at every moment the slip-slop of heelless shoes 
dragging their way along the pavement, and catch a 
glimpse of the heels of brilliant stockings, red, striped, 
white, occasionally a fine, ecclesiastical purple; now 
a whole flock of greenish yellow shawls passes, then, 
by itself, a bright green shawl, a grey, a blue, an 
amber; and scarcely two of all these coloured things 
are alike : the street flickers with colour, in the hot 
sunshine. Italian w^omen are never at rest in their 
shawls; they are always unwinding them, resettling 
their folds, shifting them from head to shoulders, and 
back again, slipping out a ringed hand to sketch a 
whole series of gestures. And they are never in a 
hurry. They come and go, stop, form into groups, 
talk leisurely, and then go on their way, almost, I like 
to think, with the mechanical movement of a herd of 
cows, with the same deep sense of repose, of animal 
contentment, which comes of living in the sun. 



V 



VII 

Venetian women are rarely pretty, often charm- 



VENICE 89 

ing, generally handsome. And all of them, without 
exception, walk splendidly, not taking little mincing 
feminine steps, but with a fine, grave stride, due 
partly to the fact that they are accustomed to wear 
heelless slippers, which oblige them to plant the feet 
firmly, and the whole foot at once, without a chance 
of tripping upon the toes or pounding upon the 
heels, as women who wear tight boots are able, and 
only too apt, to do ; they walk with almost the same 
action as if they were bare-footed, and almost as 
well. And they use the whole body in walking, 
not with the undulatory motion of Spanish women, 
but with a movement of the whole back and shoul- 
ders, in the exact swing of the stride. Venetian 
women do, however, remind one in many ways 
of Spanish women, in their way of doing the hair, 
of wearing the mantilla, for instance; the Moorish 
element, which is their bond of union, coming out 
so naturally in Venice, where one finds, quite as a 
matter of course, an Antico Caffh dei Mori, where a 
cigarette is still known as a spagnoletto, w^here the 
dialect touches Spanish at all points. The types of 
Venetian women vary in every quarter :the women 
of the Castello have quite a different look from the 
women of the Dorsoduro. In a seaport town there 
is always a certain intermixture of races, and Venice, 
with the different layers of its different occupations 
and conquests, is variable to a greater degree than 
most seaports. Remembering that nearness which 
Venice has always had to the East, it is not alto- 



90 VENICE 

gether surprising to find among the Venetian types, 
and not least frequently, one which is almost Jap- 
anese. They are singularly charming, these small, 
dark, cat-like creatures, with their small black eyes, 
vivid as the eyes of a wild animal, their little noses, 
prettily curved in at the tip, their mouths with 
thick, finely curved lips, their hair, too, sometimes 
drawn back in the Japanese manner. And they 
have that look of catlike comfort and good-humour 
which is also a Japanese habit. Then there are 
many Jews here, and in the Jewish women you find 
often the finest type of Jewish beauty, in which 
the racial characteristics stop short just at the 
perfect moment. You find, too, but only now and 
again, the vivid swarthiness of the gipsy, with the 
gipsy's shining black hair, as black and polished as 
ebony, plaited and coiled tightly round the back 
of the head. 

Then there are many quite blonde women. The 
Venetian red does not, indeed, exist, if it ever did, 
in nature; the recipes for its production may still 
be read : a painful process, in which you sat in the 
full heat of the sun, with your face covered, and your 
hair laid out around you to get soaked and coloured 
with sunlight. The women nowadays feel that the 
colour is not worth the headache. But they add to 
nature in one matter with extraordinary persistence : 
they powder their faces, slightly on week-days, and 
thickly on f est as, rarely with much art ; with, rather, 
an ingenuous obviousness which, so far as my ob- 



VENICE 91 

servation goes, is unique. Even quite young girls 
use poudre de riz, without the slightest necessity 
for its use; possibly, for one reason, because they 
think it bad for the complexion to wash the face 
much, and powder saves a good deal of washing. 
It gives a charming air of sophistication to people 
who are not too civilised to be frankly human, w^ho 
are in most things so natural and who are so happily 
wanting in those "little ways" which w^e call, by 
way of reproach, feminine. But they are full of 
fantastic contradictions, powdering their faces, which 
are nice, and leaving their figures, which are some- 
times inclined to broaden unreasonably, to take care 
of themselves, without the aid or the direction of 
stays. And there is something elaborately artificial 
in the way many of them have of doing their hair, 
in little kiss-curls, composed in all manner of different 
ways; in little rows of cork-screws, or harebells 
tinkling along the forehead; or in trails down 
the side of the cheeks, as in Carpaccio's great 
picture of the "Courtesans". There is something, 
in their whole aspect, slightly self-conscious, charm- 
ingly so, indeed; a smorfia which gives a curious, 
ambiguous, at once asking and denying complaisance 
to their lips and eyes, as if they refused nothing 
without a full knowledge of what they were refusing. 
Women and girls, even children, dress exactly alike; 
and there is nothing more comical, more charming 
than the little people of twelve who look like twenty ; 
brilliant, fascinating little people, at once very 



92 VENICE 

childish and very mature, with their hair coiled at the 
back like their elders, their skirts down to their 
heels, their shawls too long for them, dangling to the 
ground, but worn with an air of infinite importance 
and self-sufficiency. And the colours of all these 
women, the elegant olives, the delicate blondes, the 
sombre browns, are thrown out so admirably, so 
finely adorned, by the vivid colours of shawls, and 
dresses, and stockings, which would be gaudy else- 
where, but which here, in the heat and glitter of 
such an atmosphere, are always in place, never im- 
moderate; they are all part of the picture, the 
great genre picture which is Venice. 

VIII 

They have been giving Goldoni at the Teatro 
Rossini, with a company of excellent Italian come- 
dians, and as the chatter in the gallery ends, and 
the chatter begins on the stage, I have found for 
once the perfect illusion: there is no difference 
between the one and the other. Voluble, living 
Venice, with its unchanging attitude towards things, 
the prompt gaiety and gravity of its temperament, 
finds equal expression in that gallery and, in this 
interpretation of Goldoni, on that stage. 

Going to the theatre in Venice is like a fantastic 
overture to the play, and sets one's mood properly 
in tune. You step into the gondola, which darts 
at once across a space of half-lighted water, and 



VENICE 93 

turns down a narrow canal between walls which 
seem to reach more than half-way to the stars. The 
tiny lantern in the prow sheds no light, is indeed no 
more than a signal of approach, and you seem to be 
sliding straight into the darkness. Here and there 
a lamp shines from a bridge or at the water gate of 
a house, but with no more than enough light to 
make the darkness seen. The gondola sways, 
swerves, and is round a sharp corner, and the water 
rushes against the oar as it swings the keel straight 
for another plunge forward. You see in flashes: 
an alley with people moving against the light, the 
shape of a door or balcony, seen dimly and in a 
wholly new aspect, a broad, well-lighted square, a 
dark church-front, a bridge overhead, the water 
lapping against the green stone of a wall which 
your elbow all but touches, a head thrust from a 
window, the gondola which passes you, sliding 
gently and suddenly alongside, and disappearing 
into an unseen quiet. And, whenever you turn 
your head, you will see, bending against the oar 
and swaying with every movement of this horse of 
the waters, his rider, the gondolier. 

The realisation of Venice comes slowly, piece by 
piece, and it is long before one has a perfectly definite 
sense of the traffic, and of what that traffic means, 
in these streets of water, which seem at first to be 
made for no more than ornament and the promenade 
of strangers. The dust-carts, when one grazes them 
in the side canals, begin to suggest other uses in this 



94 VENICE 

decorative water, and one day, meeting the gondola 
of the post-office, rowing hard from the station, one 
sees another, as it seems, transposition of things. 
Going under the Bridge of Sighs, one sees the rough, 
iron-bolted prison gondolas, with their square felzi 
of solid wood, pierced by air holes on each side. 
Crossing the Rialto one looks down on a procession 
of gondolas, that approach slowly, and under the 
tufted black hoods one sees the white flowers 
and favours of a wedding. Funerals cross be- 
tween the Fondamenta Nuove and the cemetery 
island of San Michele, and the dead people still 
go in their gondolas, under the last, narrower, 
felzi. 

Spectacular as all Venice is, there is nothing in 
all Venice more spectacular than the gondola. It 
is always difficult for me to realise that a gondola is 
not a living thing. It responds so delicately to a 
touch, the turn of a muscle; is so exquisitely sym- 
pathetic, so vivid in its pride of motion, so gentle 
and courteous with an adversary. And just as a 
perfect rider becomes one body with his horse, 
realising actually the fable of the centaur, so the 
gondolier and the gondola seem to flow into a sin- 
gle human rhythm. Nor is the gondola an easy 
creature to master. To poise yourself on the edge 
of the stern, and row forward, using only half a 
rowlock, and to shoot round corner after corner, 
from a narrow canal into a narrower, without so 
much as grazing the prow of the gondola which 



VENICE 95 

meets you: that requires, at every moment, the 
swift and certain address of the polo-player guiding 
his pony through a crashing melee. I never quite 
knew whether it was more delightful to lie in a 
gondola and watch the land from the water, or to 
watch the gondola from land. From land, perhaps, 
at night, when something slim and dark glides by, 
the two rowers moving in silhouette, with the 
fantastic bowing motion of the little figures at the 
Chat Noir; or, again at night, when you hear a 
strong voice singing, and a coloured line floats down 
the canal, the singing boat in the midst, paper 
lanterns tossing a variable light over the man who 
stands at the prow and the women with hooded 
heads, smiling, who play an accompaniment on 
mandolins. But from the water, certainly, if it is 
your good luck to see the great serenata, such as the 
one I saw when the King of Italy and the Emperor 
of Germany played that little masque of Kings at 
Venice. The galleggiante, with its five thousand 
lights, a great floating dome of crystals, started from 
the Rialto ; from the midst of the lights came music, 
Wagner and Rossini, Berlioz and the vivid, rattling, 
never quite sincere, Marcia Re ale; and the luminous 
house of sound floated slowly, almost imperceptibly, 
down the Grand Canal, a black cluster of gondolas 
before it and beside it and behind it, packed so 
tightly together that you could have walked across 
them, from shore to shore. From my gondola, in the 
midst of all these black hulls and bristling steel 



96 VENICE 

prows, through the forest of oars, upright in the 
water, between the towering figures of the gon- 
doliers bending against their oars, over the heads of 
the mass of people heaped together on this solid, 
moving, changing floor of boats, I could see a yet 
greater crowd on every point of the shore, on the 
steps of the Salute, along the line of the Dogana, 
on every landing-stage, at every window, high up on 
the roofs. Bengal lights burned steadily; flash- 
lights darted across the sky, with their crude, 
sudden illumination; rockets went up, paper lanterns 
swayed and smoked ; and as we floated slowly, imper- 
ceptibly down, it seemed as if the palaces on each side 
of us were afloat too, drifting past us, to the sound of 
music, through a night brilliant with strange fires. 

What struck me then, as I found myself in the 
midst of this jostling, tightly packed crowd, every 
gondolier in violent action, shouting in that hoarse, 
abrupt, stomachic voice which goes so well with the 
unconsonanted Venetian dialect, was that not a single 
one of them lost his temper, though each was doing 
his best to outwit the other, and get his gondola a 
little nearer to the music ; and I reflected how much 
the situation would have tried the temper of a Lon- 
don cabman. Their language, like their gestures, 
was but decorative. The gondolier in Venice is as 
fine to look at as his gondola; he has colour, too, in 
the ruddy dye of his face, the infinite variety of his 
amber shirts and blue trousers and scarlet sashes; 
and if you really know him, he is one of the most 



VENICE 97 

charming of people. It is by no means knowing the 
gondoliers to have known them only as a master 
who hires a man, and gets him at the lowest bidding. 
Living on the Zattere, near which so many of them 
live, I have had the chance of seeing them as they 
are among themselves; I have played boccie with 
them in the bowling-alley under the trellised vines, 
from which the first drops of sap were beginning to 
drip; I have sat with them in the tavern parlour, 
beside the great chimney-corner, under the burnished 
pots and pans, watching them play a mysterious 
game with fantastic cards. And I have always felt 
myself to be in the company of gentlemen. 



IX 



From the Casa on the Giudecca I look across the 
water and see Venice. Is there another window 
from which one can see so much of the beauty of land 
and water? Opposite, along the Zattere, they are 
unloading the boats: I see the black hulls and a 
forest of masts and rigging. A steamer has come 
in from Trieste, and lies between San Giorgio and 
the Dogana, with its little black flock of gondolas 
about it. An orange sail creeps steadily past the 
window, and I hear the sail creak against the mast. 
High above the houses, almost with the dominance 
of the Suleimanie at Constantinople, the great domes 
of the Salute rise above the green trees and brown 
roofs of the Patriarch's Palace. That long line 



98 VENICE 

above the water, curving slightly until San Giorgio 
intercepts it, is the Riva, and at all hours I can 
watch it change colour, and sink into shadow, and 
emerge with the lamps at night, a dark outline, 
out of which the Doge's Palace rises, always white, 
always mysterious, always at once solid and ex- 
quisite. Every day one sees it, beside and above 
the greyish green of the bulbous domes of St. Mark's, 
the two columns of Syrian granite on the Piazzetta, 
and the winged lion of St. Mark, with his fierce 
laughter and alert springing body, who, from that 
height, challenges the ships. 

This long narrow island of the Giudecca, with its 
houses now mere shells, granaries, storehouses, or 
cottages for fisher people, had its palaces once, and 
the Casa in which I am living was built by Palladio, 
who planned the Redentore on the left, and San 
Giorgio Maggiore on the little neighbouring island 
to the right. Everything in the house is beautiful 
and ample : the long courtyard opening, through two 
stone pillars wreathed with vines, upon the garden ; 
the stone staircase and the immense room shaped like 
a cross without a top, its long wall almost filled with 
tall and slender windows opening upon stone balco- 
nies over the water; windows at the narrow end 
looking over the garden, and, beyond the iron gate- 
way with its carved stone figures on the gate-posts, 
over the vast green and brown orchard and vineyard, 
stretching to the still waters of the lagoon on the 
other side of the island. There are timbered roofs, 



VENICE 99 

vast garrets, and a chapel with its lamp still burning 
before an image of the Virgin. The guests sit down 
to their meals in the great hall, and are so far away 
from each other that their presence has almost a 
touch of unreality; one hears and sees them vaguely, 
as if in a dream, and the Venetian woman who waits 
upon us all, passing to and fro with a sleepy dignity, 
has little curls of hair hanging about her eyes like 
a woman in one of Carpaccio's pictures. Outside, 
there is always sun on the garden, once a very formal 
garden, and now just dilapidated enough for its 
quaint conventionality to borrow a new refinement, 
a touch of ruined dignity. One may wander 
through low alleys of trellised vines to the water, 
and beyond the water, on the other side of a narrow 
bank of land, the sea lies. 

There is, to those living on the Giudecca, a con- 
stant sense of the sea, and not only because there 
are always fishermen lounging on the quay, and 
fishing-boats moored on the side canals, and nets 
drying on the land, and crab-pots hanging half out 
of the water. There is a quality in the air one 
breathes, in the whole sensation of existence, which 
is like a purification from the soft and entangling 
enchantments of Venice. On the other side of the 
water, which can look so much like the sea, and 
form so rapid a barrier, yet across which every move- 
ment on the quay can be distinguished, Venice 
begins; and in Venice one is as if caught in an im- 
mense network, or spider's web, which, as one walks 

lam V^ ■\f, 



loo VENICE 

in its midst, seems to tighten the closer about one. 
The streets narrow overhead, push outwards with 
beams and stone balconies and many turning angles ; 
seem to loosen their hold for a moment where a 
bridge crosses a narrow canal between high walls 
and over dark water, and then tighten again in 
close lanes where the smells of the shops meet and 
fume about one's face. The lanes are busy with 
men in rough clothes and with women in shawls, 
bare-beaded, and with great soft bushes of hair, who 
come and go quietly, slipping past one another in 
these narrow spaces, where there is hardly room to 
pass, as the gondolas slip past one another in the 
narrow canals. The road is difficult to find, for a 
single wrong turning may lead one to the other 
end of Venice. This movement, the tangles of the 
way, the continual arresting of one's attention by 
some window, doorway, or balcony, put a strain 
upon one's eyes, and begin after a time to tire and 
stupefy the brain. There is no more bewildering 
city, and as night comes on the bewilderment 
grows almost disquieting. One seems to be turning 
in a circle, to which there is no outlet, and from 
which all one's desire is to escape. 

Coming out at last upon the Zattere, and seeing 
the breadth of water before one, it is as if one had 
gone back to the sea. The ships lie close together 
along the quay, ten deep, their masts etched against 
the sky, the water, or that faint shadow with its 
hard outline (almost level, but for the larger and 



VENICE loi 

lesser domes of the Redentore and the Zitelle) 
which is the island of the Giudecca. A few voices 
rise from the boats ; the hulls creak gently, as if they 
were talking together; there is a faint plashing of 
water, and beyond, silent, hardly visible, unlighted 
by the few lamps along the quay, the island waits, a 
little desolate and unfriendly, but half way to the 
sea. 

At night the moon swings in the sky, like the lamp 
of an illumination. There are curtains of dark, half 
drawn, and, higher in the sky, pale gold stars, like 
faint candles, in a dark which is luminous. Or, on 
an autumn night which is like summer, a moon like 
a thin silver medallion hangs low over San Giorgio, 
and turns slowly to gold, while the water, between 
moonrise and sunset, pales and glows, and the dark 
begins to creep around the masts and rigging. 

Rain in autumn brings a new, fierce beauty into 
Venice, as it falls hammering on the water and rattles 
on the wood of the boats and settles in pools in all 
the hollows of the stones. Seen under that stormy 
light, just before sunset, with a hot yellow moon 
struggling to come through the rain-clouds, Venice 
is as if veiled, and all its colours take on a fine, deep 
richness, seen through water, like polished stones 
in sea-pools. The slender masts, the thin black net- 
work of the rigging stand out delicately, and with 
an almost livid distinctness. The gondolas move 
like black streaks on the water. For a moment the 
west brightens, as the sun goes down behind a space 



I02 VENICE 

of sky that burns white, and shivers dully, streaked 
with dim yellow flakes and fleeces. 

There was a roaring of the sea all night, and in 
the morning the water splashed under the windows, 
almost level wdth the pavement. The whole Giu- 
decca was swollen, and rose everywhere into grey 
waves, tipped with white as they fell over. vSea- 
gulls had come in from the sea, and flew in circles 
over the water, dipping to the crest of the waves, 
and cur\dng around the boats laden with timber, 
that crowded close together against the Zattere. 
The wind still blew with violence, and a little rain 
fell. The sky and the w^ater were of the same leaden 
grey, and the sea-gulls flying between water and 
sky shone like white flakes of snow, blown by the 
wind. 

There is no city in Europe which contains so 
much silence as Venice, and the silence of the 
Giudecca is more lonely than any silence in Venice. 
Yet, by day and night, there are certain noises, 
w^hich one learns to expect, becomes familiar with, 
and finds no distraction in : the roar of the sea, when 
there is wind on the sea-walls, a dull, continuous, 
enveloping sound, which seems unintelligible as 
one looks across at solid land on the other side of 
water; the loud and shaking violence of wind; the 
hoarse, echoing hoot and trumpeting of great black 
or red steamers, which pass slowly or anchor almost 
under the windows, to take in stores from the gran- 
aries that stand locked and barred and as if empty, 



VENICE 103 

along the fondamenta; the deep splash of the oars 
of barges, as the men who push with long oars in the 
water set the oars against their rowlocks and begin 
the heavy rowing; the thin plash of the one oar of 
gondolas; the guttural cries, from water and the 
narrow strip of land, all in thick vowels, clotted 
together without a consonant between; and the 
ceaseless busy flapping of water upon the steps 
and around hulls, with little noises never twice 
quite the same. 



Beyond Murano the water shines level, but with 
surfaces of many textures, to where the horizon 
ends on a thin line of low green trees. On the left, 
rising into the sky, are hills, dim to their summits, 
which sparkle with snow. In one place the tide 
moves visibly under you, and then the movement is 
over, but you are on water which just breathes, 
and the breath waves it into faint patterns, like 
moir^ silk; and then it is breathless, and with a 
surface like satin. Here and there the water has 
ebbed from a mud-fiat, coloured a deep green, with 
white sea-birds sitting on the edge of the water. 
Groups of stakes, set for landmarks, outline the 
shapes of the sand-banks; and you see the white 
birds sitting on the tops of the stakes. Black masses, 
which seem at a distance like great iron cannons, are 
seen, as one comes nearer, to be forts or powder- 



I04 VENICE 

magazines, each filling a tiny island, but for a patch 
of grass or a cluster of starved trees. We pass few 
gondolas, but oftener large boats, or barges, loaded 
deep and sometimes with rafts around them, and 
men walking barefoot, with their feet half in the 
water, pushing with long poles. Dark women with 
handkerchiefs of dark red or orange over their heads 
sit on chairs in the huranelli, narrow boats rowed 
by a man who stands and rows fonvard with two 
oars which cross before him. 

The gondola with its two rowers moves swiftly 
and steadily. In front of us is Burano, with its 
leaning campanile and the long line of w^hite and 
brown houses. To the right there is a small, formal, 
and mysterious island, like the Island of Deg^th 
which Bocklin saw in picture after picture, but 
never, unless in San Francesco del Deserto, on any 
water of the earth. Dark green cypresses stand 
around the brown-roofed monastery, with its low 
tower and one leaning stone pine. Here, they tell 
you, St. Francis once came, on his way from Egypt, 
and the place where he preached is marked by a 
stone let into the wall of an inner chapel, with 
the inscription: Hie est locus uhi oravit seraphicus 
Franciscus. In the garden, a garden full of weeds, 
there is a glass shrine built over a grey and ancient 
log; it is the staff of St. Francis, the monk told me, 
and it blossomed there, and remains, a testimony, 
after five centuries. On a stone over the door of the 
cloister I read : 



VENICE 105 

**0 Beata Solitudo ! 
Sola Beatitude ! 
Elongavi fugiens, et mansi in solitudine.^* 

The monastery is now a place of penitence, and 
misbehaving monks are sent here, to meditate, and 
return, if they can, to peace, in this lonely foothold 
of land among still waters. 

As we row slowly around the sand-bank which 
lies between San Francesco and Burano, there is a 
luminous and breathless stillness on the water and 
in the air, and the reflection of the campanile and of 
the houses, every line and every colour repeated 
flawlessly, like another self rather than an image of 
itself, is seen reversed in the water. The real thing 
and the image meet, passing into one another with so 
little division that the eye can scarcely distinguish 
where the one ends and the other begins. I never 
saw so beautiful and so deceptive an illusion evoked 
out of water by the sun. Looking back at San 
Francesco, the cypresses and the one stone pine are 
scarcely less black as they plunge downwards; sea- 
gulls fly in the air over other sea-gulls, just a little 
dimmer, that seem to fly far down in the water, 
as in a crystal. 

The island of Burano, the real island and not that 
magical other island in the water, is dreary and sor- 
did; dirt lies thick in every street; the campanile is 
slowly settling over, there are cracks in the walls 
of the churches; many of the houses are already 



io6 VENICE 

ruinous. But if you look through the open doors 
you will see that every house has its piece of old oak, 
a chest or sideboard, with brass plates and copper 
pans, sometimes with china on shelves, arranged over 
it on the wall; and the brass and china are for the 
most part old, and have come down in the family, from 
generation to generation. The men in Burano are all 
fishers, the women all lace-makers. Fishing-boats lie 
with their nets and crab-pots in the canals; men 
lounge on the quays in top boots and ribbed woollen 
stockings; there is all the smell, dirt, and apparent 
idleness of a fishing village, where work waits on the 
tides and the weather. Women sit in every door- 
way, bending over the lace which they are stitching 
into the famous Burano point and into other deli- 
cate patterns. The oldest women are still at work 
with their needles ; they lift weary eyes for an instant, 
as you bend over their work, and then the eyes turn 
back to the stitching. The smallest girls are at 
work with their needles already, and you see 
them, with their little pale faces, bright eyes 
like beads, and artists' fingers, crowded together, 
row after row, in the narrow rooms of the 
factory. 

In the long central square there is a continual 
clatter of wooden shoes, and a passing of women 
and children, with coloured handkerchiefs over their 
heads. An old beggar with spectacles, a pointed 
red cap, and a long patched yellow overcoat, stops 
outside the window of the "Lion Crowned," and 



VENICE 107 

begs for bread or soldi, and small boys thrust their 
heads in, and beg laughing. 

It is but a short row from Burano to Torcello, 
and the oars of the gondola catch in the weeds of 
narrow shores. One sees little but weeds and broken 
walls and scant herbage; a few red cottages, a boat, 
a few ducks afloat by the bank. You land at what 
is hardly a village, but there is a village green, with 
clothes hung out to dry, and a few children playing 
on the green, and in the midst of the grass a very 
ancient stone chair, rudely hewn out, and standing 
against a pillar: they call it the chair of Attila, 
and they say that it was Attila's throne, when Ven- 
ice had not yet been built upon the water. Beyond, 
in two red brick buildings, open in front, there 
are innumerable fragments, a few inches square, 
of Byzantine marble, carved with patterns lovely 
enough to survive dismembering. 

On the right hand is the strange octagon of 
Santa Fosca, with its arcades and pillars, and the 
seventh-century basilica of Santa Maria, with its 
campanile, all somewhat ruinous and among so 
many ruins. Inside the doors of the Cathedral 
one sees a floor like St. Mark's, all in patterns of 
coloured marble, and walls whitewashed, and yellow 
with damp, where they are not lined with grey 
marble, or covered with Byzantine or twelfth century 
mosaics. The whole western wall is covered with 
mosaics in six tiers ; there are other mosaics in the 
tribuna and the apse, and under the dome of the 



io8 VENICE 

tribuna is the episcopal throne, with the seats of 
the priests arranged in a semicircle like the steps 
of an arena: the throne is of ancient marble, but 
the seats are no more than a shell of restored brick- 
work. On the panels of the screen and pulpit there 
are scrolls of flowers and long-necked birds, with 
conventional borders, carved in the marble; but 
the white marble has gone green. Above are half- 
ruined paintings against gold backgrounds, and 
below, in the many-coloured marble floor, a bishop 
lies carved in stone, and the stone is roughened like 
a rock on which the tide has broken. In the mosaics 
of the apse there are strange designs of birds and 
beasts and fishes, woven into delicate patterns, pea- 
cock-coloured with an unusual subtlety of colour. 
At the other end of the church the whole wall, to 
the brown rafters, is alive with the hard bright shapes 
of twelfth-century mosaic. There are heavens and 
hells, rows on rows of haloed saints in glory, angels 
blowing into conchs, strange demons, men and gods, 
all, row above row, on the dead gold with car- 
pets of green grass and coloured flowers and white 
clouds; naked figures among flames; skulls, with 
separate hands and feet, and with snakes twined 
through their eyeholes; heads with curled hair and 
earrings among red flames, cherubim with wings 
crossed beneath their chins, Mary with outstretched 
arms, and Christ sitting in judgment. These 
mosaics have been lately restored, and their fresh 
aspect, among so much and such ancient ruin, does 



VENICE 109 

but bring a touch of irrelevant new colour into this 
temple of ruined splendour, which stands here, on 
the malarious island, with an almost mysterious 
magnificence in decay. 



XI 



GoLDONi, in his memoirs, tells us that the Venetians 
sang all day long, **the shopkeepers laying out their 
wares, the workmen coming home from work, the 
gondoliers waiting for their masters"; and he adds: 
" Gaiety is at the root of the national character, and 
jesting is at the root of the Venetian language." 
The day is past when the gondoliers sang Tasso, and 
the shopkeepers do not sing now; but they stand at 
the doors of their shops and smoke, and, like every 
one else in Venice, take things comfortably. // 
dolce far niente is a sensation which can scarcely 
be realised more completely than in Venice ; and with 
such a sky, such water, and such streets, who would 
look for a bustling race of business people, like the 
Milanese? In Venice no one will work very hard 
for the sake of "getting on": why should he? I 
never saw poor people who seemed so happy, and 
who were really so comfortable in their poverty, as 
the very poorest people here. The softness of the 
climate, the little on which the comforts of life 
depend, permit poverty, even beggary, to remain 
dignified. Simply to lie in the sun, to have just 



no VENICE 

enough to eat, and plenty of cheap cigars to smoke : 
a poor man demands little more than that, and it 
is rare indeed that he does not get so much. Time 
scarcely exists in Venice; it certainly does not 
exist for the idle poor. They hanker after no 
luxuries; for, in Venice, merely to live is a luxury. 
Think of a city where bread and wine, fruit and 
flowers, are the chief things hawked about the 
streets! Wherever you go you hear the cry of 
'' Acqua!" you see a basket heaped up with brilliant 
flowers, and not far off some one is lying asleep, 
a facchino in vivid blue, one wooden shoe under 
his head for a pillow, stretched at full length in 
any nook of shade. , More even than in Rome, 
scarcely less, and far more agreeably, than in Naples, 
the whole place belongs to the people. The beggar 
who curls up asleep on your doorstep has an equal 
right with your own, and, so far as the doorstep is 
concerned, a greater, for you do not require it 
to sleep on, and he does. And there is scarcely an 
inch of Venice where he cannot lie down and go 
to sleep whenever he likes. Streets where a horse 
or cart is unknown are so surprisingly clean, com- 
fortable, and leisurely; they are made to be loitered 
in, lain upon, and for every man to have his way 
with. The moral of "The Sick King in Bokhara," 

"That, though we take what we desire, 
We must not snatch it eagerly," 

needs no enforcement in Venice. Every one takes 



VENICE III 

what he wants; but he takes it gently, gracefully 
as a matter of course. Your cigars belong to your 
gondolier as much as to yourself; and if he has 
two oranges, one of them is yours. 

The Venetians have but few amusements. There 
are four theatres, and these are only open for 
a few months out of the year, and supported only 
by strolling companies; there is a theatre of mario- 
nettes open still more rarely; and that is all. Once 
upon a time there was a cafe-chant ant, with a little 
company from Vienna: Annie Vivanti has sung 
there; but it has dwindled almost out of existence, 
and there is not a music-hall or a public dancing- 
hall in the whole city. No doubt this is partly 
because the people are so poor that they cannot 
pay for even the cheapest amusements; but is it 
not also because they do not require them, finding 
sufficient pleasure in things as they are, in the mere 
quiet gaiety of daily life, the fact of living always 
in the midst of a decor de thedtre, of which they are 
themselves acting the drama? That animal content 
which comes over one in Venice, taking away the 
desire of action and the need of excitement which 
waylay the mind and the senses under less perfect 
skies, makes it just as possible to be happy without 
running after amusement as the simplicity of the 
conditions of life makes it possible for the poor man 
to live on polenta and a little fruit. There is some- 
thing drowsy in the air of Venice, as there is some- 



112 VENICE 

thing a little sleepy in the eyes of the Venetians. 
Is not life, to those who live there always, as it is 
to those who come and go in it for pleasure, a 
I kind of day-dream? 

Spring, 1894, and 1897, and Autumn, 1903. 



NAPLES 



113 



NAPLES 
I 

I HAVE rarely entered a strange city without a 
certain apprehension ; but no city ever filled me with 
such terror as Naples. These long streets of tall, 
mean houses, from which narrow alleys climbed the 
hill, and descended to the harbour, in row after row 
of meaner and not less tall houses, all with their little 
iron balconies, over which clothes and linen draggled, 
all with their crowded, squalid, patched, and coloured 
throngs of restless life; the cracking of whips, the 
clatter of wheels and of horses' hoofs on the uneven 
stones; the thud of the cow-bell, the sharper tinkle 
of the goat-bell, as the creatures wander about the 
streets or wait at the doors of houses; the rattling 
of bootblacks' brushes, the petulant whine of beggars, 
the whole buzz of that humming, half-obliterated 
Neapolitan, with its punctuation of gestures; the 
rush and hustling of those sidewalks, after the 
ample and courteous leisure of Rome; something 
sordid in the very trees on the sea-front, second- 
rate in the aspect of the carriages that passed, and 
of the people who sat in them; the bare feet, rags. 



ii6 NAPLES 

rainbow-coloured dirt, sprawling and spawning 
poverty of Santa Lucia, and not of Santa Lucia 
alone ; the odour of the city ; and then the indiscover- 
able length and extent of it, the ways that seemed 
to lead in whatever direction I wanted to go, and 
then ended suddenly, or turned aside in another 
direction; the darkness up the hill, and the un- 
certainty of all those new, as yet unknown, roads: 
that, as I turned away from the sea, when night 
began to come down upon it, mounted to my head 
like some horrible fume, enveloping me with disgust, 
possessing me with terror. I have got a little ac- 
customed to it now; I know my way through those 
streets, which are, after all, simple enough in their 
arrangement; I have come to see certain advantages, 
even, in the turning of all this dirt and poverty out 
into the sun; I find it a touching tribute to cleanli- 
ness that every other poor person whom you see is 
hunting for his own or his neighbour's vermin; but, 
all the same, I think my first impression is likely 
to last. 

I do not think that the Neapolitans are more 
vicious or intend to be more objectionable than 
other people, but they are poor, naturally untidy; 
they live in the street because there is sun and air 
in the street, and it does not occur to them that 
there is anything in human nature to hide. They 
have an absolute, an almost ingenuous, lack of 
civilisation, and after seeing the Neapolitans I have 
more respect for civilisation. I am not convinced 



NAPLES 117 

that the whole of the pavement belongs to the 
dirtiest part of the people who walk on it, and that 
these have exactly the right to encamp with their 
wives and famiHes in the way of one's feet, and 
to perform quite the whole of their toilet before 
one's eyes. For these people, w^hom you see in 
Santa Lucia and the Strada del Porto and along the 
whole of the quays, are as shameless as animals: 
look into their faces, and you will see in their great, 
dark eyes the unintelligent regard of animals. Old 
age and infancy are here more horrible than any- 
where else; that beginning and ending of human 
life in helplessness and physical dishonour are here 
emphasised with all the cruelty of which nature, 
left to herself, is capable. A Christian ascetic, 
wishing to meditate on the disgust of the flesh, 
might well visit these quays. There he will see 
the flaccid yellowness of old women, like the skin 
of a rotten apple ; wrinkles eaten in with grime, until 
they broaden into ruts; feet and ankles that have 
been caked and roasted and soaked into iridescent 
reds, smoky violets, shot purples; the horror of 
decayed eyes, deformed limbs, hair crawling with 
lice; and about these dishonoured bodies flutters a 
medley of blackened and yellowing linen, tattered 
trousers Vv^ithout buttons, tattered dresses without 
strings, torn shawls, still loud in colour, but purple 
where they had been red, and lavender where they 
had been blue. And all this malodorous medley is 
a-swarm, hoarse voices crying, hands in continual 



ii8 NAPLES 

movement, the clatter of heelless shoes on the pave- 
ment, the splash of emptied vessels, laughter, the 
harsh notes of a song, rising out of their midst like 
the bubble of steam escaping out of a boiling pot. 



II 



Naples varies in aspect according as you see it 
from above or below, from the side which looks 
towards Vesuvius, the side which looks towards 
Capri, the side which merges into Posillipo; and 
no generalisation can express the effect of this pre- 
cipitous and straggling town, under the shadow of 
the burning mountain, and itself crawling up and 
down the sides of volcanic hills, set in a half -circle 
against the curve of the bay. Looking from Capodi- 
monte you would say that it nestled among green 
trees ; looking from the sea-front you would say that 
it was built out of the sheer rock. And its colour 
varies like its contour. Rain warmed by sunshine 
brings out the finest colours, and shows you the roofs 
and railed and windowed walls in their most effective 
groupings, house piled above house, like rock piled 
above rock, green foliage seeming to grow out of 
their crevices. There never was a town which 
seemed to have been so little made, to have grown 
so entirely according to its own whim, and with so 
little regard to any consideration but the crowding 
of houses into every available inch of ground, street 
intersecting street, and salite, scale, rampe rising out 



NAPLES 119 

of these intersections wherever an unfilled corner 
could be found. Looking down on the side streets 
of Chiaia and Toledo is like looking down the clefts 
in a rock, the crevices of a mountain side ; looking up 
them, to the glimpses of the hill above, is like looking 
up from the bottom of a gorge. And whenever you 
climb, by stairways or winding terraces, to a certain 
height, you see on the east the double ridge of 
Vesuvius, smoke coiHng into clouds above the crater, 
its sides, in clear weather, spotted white with houses, 
in dull weather an indistinguishable mass of violet or 
purple, like the colour of thunder-clouds; on the 
south, the bay, in which Capri and the ridged coast 
of Sorrento appear and disappear with every change 
of weather, like the stains in stone, or a picture 
which the magic-lantern flashes upon and away from 
the sheet. 



Ill 



Naples has ceased to be merely horrible to me, a 
boiling pot; it has become a witches' cauldron. I 
begin to be fascinated by those streets which are 
corridors, with their violent shadows, their obscure 
exuberance of life; those strange glimpses, as I 
climb at night through terrace after terrace of sordid 
streets, the houses open to view, the one large room 
lit with the smoking oil-lamp, the figures bending 
over it, the white beds set side by side, from one of 
which you see already the nightcapped head of the 



I20 NAPLES 

grandmother, or a child's tumbled black hair; vague 
figures still leaning into the darkness from their 
balconies, now and then the sudden descent of a 
basket at the end of a string, the sound of a man- 
dolin or piano-organ, a song, or the rattle of feet on 
the floor; for the most part silence, or a low chatter 
which does not reach me. Lights shine out suddenly 
from curtained windows, doors open and shut, you 
hear the bolts drawn. And all kinds of strange 
archways, passages, steps leading up or down, in- 
definite turnings, perplex one at every step. There 
is a crucifix which I pass every night; it is only a 
crucifix painted upon wood, but it is set up in a 
shrine like the gable of a house; there are five oil- 
lamps about it, which cast singular lights on the 
suffering figure, hanging there, as if on a Calvary, at 
the side of the pavement, with fresh flowers at its 
feet. That, too, seems to me like something not 
quite natural, a part of the same sorcery which has 
piled all these rocky ways and set up these cavernous 
houses. No, there never was a town so troubling, 
so disquieting, so incalculable as Naples, with its 
heavenly bay lying out in front for strangers to gaze 
at, and all this gross, contentedly animal life huddled 
away in its midst, like some shameful secret. 



IV 



Wherever I go in Naples, in the streets, the 
theatres, the churches, the cafes, I see the same 



NAPLES 121 

uncouth violence of life, the same ferment of un- 
civilisation. Occasionally, when two Neapolitans 
meet in the street, they kiss one another with a 
loud kiss; for the nfost part they do not shake 
hands, they do not nod, they do not lift their hats; 
they stare fixedly, with an expression which I took 
to mean violent aversion until I came to find it indi- 
cated extreme friendship. Watching from a little 
distance a group of men at a cafe table, you cannot 
tell whether they are or are not having a serious 
altercation. When a Neapolitan gesticulates he 
does it with all his fingers and the whole of his 
face; when he does not gesticulate, he is rigid. All 
that is best, certainly, but all that is most typical in 
the Neapolitan seems to me to be summed up in the 
writer who more than any other has given in litera- 
ture the whole savour of Naples. Matilde Serao 
makes on one the impression of a good-humoured 
gnome. Full of strength, sincerity, emotion, full of 
an irresistible charm of humanity, she is so short and 
stout as to be almost square; her head, too, with its 
low forehead, is square; and she sits humped up, 
with her head between her shoulders, all compressed 
vivacity, which is ready to burst forth at any moment 
in a flood of energetic, humorously emphatic words, 
to which her leaping gestures with her short fat 
fingers, in front of her nose, of her grimacing eyes, 
of her cheeks wrinkled with laughter, add a further 
and a yet more grotesque emphasis. 

I heard the 'Xavalleria Rusticana" one night at 



122 NAPLES 

the San Carlo theatre, and, though the character of 
the music is properly Sicilian, it seemed to me to 
have a good deal in it of the people among whom it 
is so popular. This crackling music, a fire which 
crackles out, has an acute, feverish, quite Southern 
sentimentality, the sentimentality of the mandolin 
and the knife. Kindling, certainly, while you listen 
to it, it is wiped out, as a sponge wipes out figures 
on a slate, with the first breath of air you draw out- 
side. And the true, canaille, Neapolitan music, the 
Piedigrotta songs and the rest, which you hear all 
day long, shouted, whistled, played on piano-organs, 
on mandolins, in the streets, in the restaurants, in 
the cafes-chantants, have they not the very odour of 
the streets in them? The songs are often enough 
obscene, as popular songs often enough are, and to 
hear Emilia Persico or Maldacea sing them, with a 
knowing vivacity, an abominable languor, is to realise 
all that they are capable of in the way of significant 
expression. But in the tunes themselves, with their 
heady notes, their pauses and rushes, their careful 
uncertainties of rh3rthm, their almost Spanish effects 
of monotony, there is something at once greasy and 
fiery, an acrid vulgarity which stings the senses, 
revolting and depraving, with a kind of intoxication 
like the intoxication of cheap wine. 

At Easter the Neapolitans mourn for the death 
of Jesus Christ as the Greeks mourned for the death 
of Adonis. It is a sacred play to them, in which 
they take the same turbulent, and, for the moment, 



NAPLES 123 

absorbing interest, as in an opera at San Carlo, or a 
melodrama at the Mercadante. On Good Friday, 
during the **Tre Ore" of the Passion, I went into 
the popular central church of Santa Trinita Maggiore. 
Between the high altar and the pulpit, where a 
queer, black figure in his cornered hat preached 
with a sounding voice and the gestures of a puppet, 
there was a rough platform, draped with blue cloth, 
on which was an orchestra of black-coated gentlemen 
and some singers, who sang with high Mascagni 
voices. The people, coming in continuously by 
twos and threes, rushed about the church as if it 
were the market-place, precipitately, greeting their 
friends with little sharp hisses of recognition, turning 
about in their chairs, chattering in whispers, waving 
their hands to one another, standing and arranging 
one another's hats. Never have I seen such bustHng, 
restless, disorderly churches, or people so un- 
civilised in their devotions. During the "three 
hours" the church was packed in all its corners, 
people sitting on the altar- steps, and on the altars, 
perched in and around all the confessionals ; the men 
piled their hats into the empty holy-water basins, 
the women who had come without hats did not cover 
their heads with handkerchiefs; during the sermon 
all listened attentively, as to a really absorbing play. 
On the day before Holy Thursday, there had been 
the celebration of the Santo Sepolcro. The doors 
of the churches were draped in black, the high altar 
was covered with black cloth, and on a black cloth 



124 NAPLES 

before the high altar the crucifix was laid out, as 
if in a tomb. Some of the Christs were small, of 
dark metal, almost indistinguishable from a little 
distance; others were large, made of painted wood, 
with smears of red paint for the five wounds ; and a 
crowd came and went all day long, mostly women, 
and these women knelt and kissed the five wounds, 
almost prostrating themselves on the floor. There 
was something grotesque, familiar, amorous, extra- 
vagant, in this unending procession of women, rich 
and poor, young and old, all, one after another, 
dropping on their knees, leaning over the sacred 
body, whose passion was shown to them with so 
visible a significance ; something, I cannot tell what, 
barbaric, infantile, sensuous, in the sight and sound 
of all those devout and eager kisses, which they 
gave with a passionate solemnity, as to a lover. 

V 

Outside Naples, between Vesuvius and the sea, 
half buried and half recovered from the earth, the 
ghastly suburb of Pompeii repeats, like a remote 
echo, the very note of Naples. Pompeii, though 
you will find it large enough when you follow all 
the intersections of its abrupt, crossing ways, re- 
mains in the memory like a toy city, or a cabinet in 
a museum. And, as one walks in these streets, in 
which noise or silence is alike oppressive, interrupt- 
ing, it is possible to persuade oneself that one is 



NAPLES 125 

merely visiting a museum, looking at curiosities. In 
so frightful a step back of nearly twenty centuries, 
the mind reels, clutching at that somewhat pacifying 
thought, for at least its momentary relief. And 
then, all at once, turning aside into an empty street 
from the guide and the visitors, you are seized, and, 
as it were, imprisoned within the terror of this 
image of the immortality of death, before which all 
the legends of hell become credible, seeing how 
hard it is to escape, even by death, out of the bond- 
age of even a material indestructibility. Here are 
the bodies of men and women, moulded for ever in 
the gesture of their last moment, and these rigid 
earthly corpses are as vivid in their interrupted life 
as the wet corpses lying on the slabs of the Morgue, 
the suicides of yesterday. These hastily set up walls 
might have been built last year, and the rut of the 
waggon-wheels in the solid pavement of lava is like 
a wheel-mark left overnight in the dry mud of a 
country road. The brothel and the temple are here, 
side by side, and here, only just cleansed from its 
burial, is a villa, its walls still bright with paint, still 
eloquent with frescoes, the little bronze and marble 
images still smiling about the fountains and flower- 
beds of the central garden; a pot, the yellow rust 
of lava corroding it, set over the fire which went out 
suddenly on that twenty-fourth of August, a.d. 79. 
Feeling the stone and mortar of these jerry-built 
walls, noting the conventional glibness of these 
graceful decorative paintings, realising, by the very 



126 NAPLES 

signs of its "pleasant sins," that here, after all, was 
but the Brighton of its day, you seem, by the con- 
sciousness of all that is trivial, temporary, accidental 
in it, to be brought closer to that so strangely 
capricious survival of ancient death. And then, 
going out into the road, in the first step beyond the 
hedge, in the first breath of relief at the sight of 
the little station, the two hotels for visitors, the 
quiet fields in which men are digging, fruitful fields 
stretching out to the roots of the mountains all 
around, Vesuvius smoking placidly above, this un- 
bearable sense of the nearness of life suspended so 
many years ago drops back suddenly, and again it is 
as if it had never been, and again you have persuaded 
yourself that this is after all only a show in a mu- 
seum, a collection of curiosities, a toy city which 
had never really had anything too intimate to do 
with humanity. 



VI 



There is in Naples the image of a world, which 
adds a new world to one's contemplation, not less 
vivid and swarming than those streets; and that 
world of the Aquarium seems as real, as natural, in 
all its fantastic, extravagant, and enigmatical life, as 
the life of human beings. It is, indeed, first by its 
humanity that it strikes us, by the strange irony of 
the likeness which one sees in these scaled, pulpy, 
and many-tentacled creatures of the sea, in the very 



NAPLES 127 

expression of their eyes and bodies, and also in the 
whole manner of their occupations among the rocks 
and their neighbours, with the faces and the doings 
of men. There is not a human vice or absurdity 
which I have not seemed to see in these drowsy, and 
irritable, and rapacious, and surly, and preoccupied 
creatures, their whole lives spent in catching flies 
(with what an elaborate mechanism of means to that 
end!) in coiling and uncoiling an army of suckers to 
the very obliteration, almost, of the centre of their 
being; in fanning themselves, with soft, unresting 
wings, forwards and backwards, forwards and back- 
wards, for ever, neither turning nor ceasing for a 
moment. Some have the aspect of eternal age, as 
others have the curse of eternal activity. In the 
great, sullen, flat creatures with their purple bodies, 
their bull-dog jaws, their heavy eyes, I see the gross 
bourgeois, as he is ever3rwhere in the world; it 
seems that he inhabits the water as he inhabits the 
earth, and with the same authority. Is there not a 
heavy coquetry in the motions of a certain kind of 
eel, the very effervescence of bumptious youth in 
the little fishes with fins which look like arms 
a-kimbo, the very parody of our aspirations in the 
diaphanous, delicately coloured creatures, edged 
with lavender, who have puffed all their life into 
their heads, which for ever pant and strain upw^ards 
like balloons, as if trying to free themselves of the 
little tangle of body still left to them? Then, too, 
there is a fantasy more terrible than any nightmare, 



128 NAPLES 

a soft, seductively coloured, deceptive, strangling 
life in these clinging, and absorbing, and stealthy 
apparitions of the sea, which come and go in the 
water with the sudden and soft violence of the 
w^ater itself. 

Coming up out of the twilight, where I have 
been gazing into the glass boxes filled with water, 
wondering at these uneasy miracles of the sense of 
touch, I find myself replunged into the bustle of 
Naples; for the concert has begun in the Villa, and 
people are walking to and fro under the trees, and 
sitting on the chairs about the band-stand, listening 
to the harsh din of those brass instruments playing 
their noisy, military, Italian music. The garden of 
the Villa Nazionale lies for a mile along the sea- 
front, from the Largo della Vittoria almost to the 
beginning of Posillipo, and you can stand under the 
curdling blossoms of the Judas trees, and still see 
the blue water shining under the afternoon sun or 
the tossing of the little waves when the wind begins 
to blow them grey. On the afternoon when I had 
visited the Aquarium, clouds began to climb over 
the top of the hill, catching stormy colours and then 
turning leaden; and presently the concert came 
abruptly to an end, as the rain poured with a straight, 
steady violence, scattering the people hither and 
thither into the little wooden cafes, under the thin 
branches of trees, under the drooping hoods of 
cabs, and behind the flapping curtains of trams. I 
sat in one of the cafes and watched the hurry of 



NAPLES 129 

people unprepared for anything but sunshine; the 
blind rush through the puddles, the shelterless 
lingering under dripping trees, the half -desperate, 
half -hoping glances upward at the grey sky, which 
might be blue again at any moment or perhaps 
not for an hour's time. All the brightness, the 
unconsidering gaiety of Naples had gone out like 
a candle in the wind ; life seemed to come angrily to 
a pause, in this sudden hostility of nature. Pres- 
ently I heard the twanging of a string: two men 
with mandolin and fiddle were standing in the 
doorway, and a woman began to sing one of the 
Piedigrotta songs. A man carrying a cloth-covered 
box came in, took off his cap, and went smilingly, 
persistently, from table to table with his tortoise- 
shell combs, his corals, and his brooches of lava. 
Outside the window crouched a dark, handsome, 
half-witted beggar-girl, with her red handkerchief 
over her head, her white teeth shining in a smile; 
she held out her little brown hand, beckoning for 
alms; and standing there, bare-footed in the rain, 
seemed to bring back the Neapolitan accent to 
Naples. 

Spring, 1897. 
9 



FLORENCE : AN INTERPRETATION 



131 



FLORENCE: AN INTERPRETATION 

I. DONATE LLO 

Florence is a corridor, through which the beauty 
and finery of the world have passed. That new 
Spring which BotticelH painted, and which was the 
Renaissance, flowered into the Florentine lilies with 
more of its ardour, and a more "hard and deter- 
minate outline," than in any other Italian soil. 
Giotto's Campanile, itself a lily, is the seal and sig- 
nature of what in Florence is straight, slender, full 
of formal grace. Florentine art has always been an 
art of form, of delicate but precise outline, and the 
shape of the city, of its bridges and palaces, is of a 
severe elegance, and it lies, glittering like silver and 
with all the daintiness of silver-work, in the hollow 
of the Apennines. Looking down on it from San 
Miniato, Brunelleschi's dome and the dragon-neck 
of the Palazzo Vecchio and the flowerlike Campanile 
stand out like great jewels from the casket, and 
the Amo clasps it like a jewelled band. It is gar- 
landed with gardens, encircled with hills, but it is 
the river that completes its beauty. 

There are more masterpieces in Florence than in 

133 



134 FLORENCE 

any city in the world. Masterpieces are at every 
street corner, there are whole squares of master- 
pieces, like that square which contains Brunel- 
leschi's dome, Giotto's tower, and Ghiberti's gates. 
Santa Maria Novella conceals wonders, but is there 
anything inside more lovely than those outer walls 
of marble? The visitor hastening to see the sculp- 
ture which it contains forgets to realise how much 
the Bargello is one of its own treasures. Picture- 
galleries in palaces call one away from what is 
lovely in the streets, the river-side, the bridges, 
though indeed the art of the bridges, the aspect 
which has come to that river-side, are akin to all 
that Florence has created in paint and marble in 
those galleries. If we could endure so continual a 
pressure and solicitation of beauty, no city would 
be so good to live in as Florence ; but the eyes cannot 
take rest in it: they are preoccupied, indoors and 
out of doors; this prevalence of rare things becomes 
almost an oppression. That is why it is better to 
live outside the gates, a little way up one of the 
hillsides: to look down on Florence, ''washed in the 
morning water-gold," as Browning saw it, or at 
night, like a flower that opens secretly with evening, 
and to go down into it on daily errands, to see one 
beautiful thing and come away. 

Florence to-day is like a woman who has been 
praised so long that she has become self-conscious, 
and seems to have no longer an individual life of 
her own, but to await homage. Her Venus typifies 



FLORENCE 135 

her, the chilly conscious Venus of the Medici. She 
has no sorcery, and there is no part of her charm 
which you cannot define. Time scarcely changes 
her, and she suffices to the American tourist as easily 
as she sufficed to Cosimo. Hers are all tangible 
beauties and all forms of life in which the rhythm 
is never broken. Excess is alien to her; to her, ex- 
uberance is not beauty. The mystery of Leonardo 
is a foreign thing to her, which comes and goes in 
her midst, a visitor welcomed but not understood. 
She understands Verrocchio. Michelangelo leaves 
in one of her courtly chapels a rock half hewn out 
of the earth itself: that ''Day" who lives with a 
more intense, complete, and overpowering life than 
the other more finished figures. But Florence is 
never really at home with Michelangelo. She made 
Donatello in her own image. 

In Florence there is nothing of the majesty of 
Rome nor of the sea-magic of Venice. Rome is 
made out of the eternal hills, on which the ends of 
the world have come, age by age; it is the city 
made glorious by Michelangelo and Michelangelo 
typifies its glories. Venice is born out of the 
marriage of land and sea, and it was Titian who 
took up the Doge's ring out of the water, and per- 
petuated the new ecstasy of colour. But Florence, 
marvellously built, every stone set decorously on 
stone, a conscious work of craftsmen upon material 
naturally adaptable, is represented rather by sculp- 
ture than by painting, and, in painting, by precise 



136 FLORENCE 

and sensitive design, an almost sculptured out- 
line. Florence, the city of all the arts, the corridor 
through which all the arts have passed and in which 
they still linger, is the city made to be a shrine for 
Donatello. 

To Donatello there was no conflict between the 
rh3rthm of beauty and the rhythm of life ; none even 
between a sense of reality exasperated to a point of 
fierce intensity and a suavity and grace of form 
which has in it a quality of abstract joy ; none between 
a decoration of great elaborateness and a culmi- 
nating effect of entire simpleness, a sufficing unity. 
He has no distinction to make between reality and 
the ideal; he has no prejudice against ugliness, yet 
never falls into the grotesque; he will work in any 
medium; adopt, as it seems, any manner; yet an 
individuality, curiously strange and certain, is seen 
in all his work, through all his disguises ; there is as 
sharp a savour in his laughing and dancing children 
as in his Magdalen who has sinned and grown old. 
He is part of the Renaissance, and, together with 
Botticelli, expresses the secret and perpetuates the 
delicate, severe essence of Florence, as it came in 
that age to perfection. 

Between the Greeks and Donatello there had 
been great sculpture; but the art, as an individual 
and organic thing, awoke only in Donatello. The 
sculptors of the Gothic cathedrals, the carvers of 
tombs, had inspirations of genius, and no art in 
bronze or marble could do things finer of their kind 



FLORENCE 137 

than those representations of death, in which the 
faith of the Middle Ages seems to survive. There is 
a bronze tombstone in the church of S. Trinita in 
Florence which, with its wry mouth and puckered 
eyelids, denoting a ghastly continuance of life, 
suggests almost the huddled grandeur, here funereal, 
of Rodin's Balzac. How much Donatello learnt 
from these great craftsmen may be seen at Siena, 
in the bronze tombstone of Bishop Pecci. The 
folds are freer, easier, with less of that mighty 
emphasis of the Middle Ages; and they are definite, 
imagined as covering the limbs of an actual body. 
The bronze becomes almost pictorial. And, as we 
see Donatello going back to the Middle Ages, re- 
viving a manner and yet experimxcnting upon it, 
so we see him experimenting with the energy of life 
itself, in all directions, not content without turning 
bronze or marble or wood or stone to his own uses, 
and leaving them with new possibilities for others; 
for Rodin, certainly, who has learned many of his 
secrets. With Donatello awakens and dies a whole 
art of his own, but after him ancient sculpture is 
over and modern sculpture has begun. 

To see the likeness between Donatello and that 
fresh, curious and eager, half childlike and wholly 
experienced spirit and temper which blossomed 
with the Renaissance, and with special rarity at 
Florence, it is enough to see the bronze David in 
the Bargello and the Judith and Holof ernes in the 
Loggia. The David of Michelangelo, the copy made 



138 FLORENCE 

of it, dominates Florence, a giant against its sky; 
but it is not of the nature of Florence, a native 
growth. It has an admirable strength, an easy 
bigness; but how much more Florentine, how much 
more interesting, the subtle, almost perverse dainti- 
ness of Donatellol Again, in the Loggia, how sig- 
nificant it is to contrast the Judith of Donatello, 
with its exquisite quietude, in which horror becomes 
beauty, quieted into eternal rest, with the Perseus of 
Cellini, its neighbour there, and so out of place. The 
Perseus is done with conscious heat and exterior 
vivacity of life, with an air of bravado in the whole 
pose : the generalised limbs and features, the decora- 
tive body, showy and fine, the terrorless Medusa 
head from which the blood drips like clotted pearls, 
the trunk from which blood sprouts like a bunch of 
grapes; the over-elaborated pedestal, with the 
marble Isises, its niches with restless bronze figures 
dancing, or meaninglessly arrested. Michelangelo 
is great and Cellini is little, but both seem to be set 
up in Florence for the better identification of the 
Florentine spirit in Donatello. 

In the David we have a delicate manly joy, too 
simple to be heroic, too young to be conscious of 
the greatness of an instinctive action; and in the 
flower-like and girlish body, equipped so daintily 
and so daringly for warfare, Donatello has created 
the modern type of youthful male beauty, the keen- 
witted younger brother of the Faun of Praxiteles, 
in whom the soul has awakened, but only to a keener 



FLORENCE 139 

consciousness of the delightfulness of life. The face 
under the garlanded hat is full of that modern 
beauty in which expression counts for so much; 
but the boy is already unconscious of the terrible 
head on which his mailed foot treads. Judith, as 
she raises the sword to cut through the offered 
neck of Holof ernes, has a more passionate meaning 
in her eyes; her serene, slender, and elegant beauty 
is the destructive beauty of woman, and the man 
who sits at her feet, helpless, dazed by lust, with 
closed eyes and open palms, awaits death sleepily, 
like a lover. This man and this woman keep the 
eternal attitude with a ghastly and lovely placidity ; 
and it is with a faultless sense of beauty that Dona- 
tello has woven them together into this mortal 
rhythm. 

In the Judith the two bodies, standing and sitting, 
fit into one as if moulded out of a single substance, 
yet with no loss of whatever is essential in the drama. 
And in the David also there is a Hke flawless in- 
genuity of composition: the head, with its helmet, 
fitting into the space between the two legs, one wing 
of the helmet broken sharp off on the side next to 
the ground, the other rising up the leg along the 
greaves, so decoratively ; the toes which curl over 
in their bronze sandals on the lower part of the dead 
cheek, between the beard and moustache ; the decora- 
tive value, dainty, not terrifying, of the decapitated 
head on which the flower-like creature tramples. 

In the Judith and in the David, which are both 



T40 FLORENCE 

made out of terrible subjects, there is an equal share 
of that singular joy which we find somewhere in 
almost all the best work of Donatello. Does it 
come to them from a capture of life or from a last 
perfection of style? It is to be distinguished, giving 
a thrilling, not easily explicable quality of attraction 
to work not in itself at first attractive. In the Zuc- 
cone of the Campanile we have a harmony, unlike 
any other in sculpture, except perhaps in some of 
those statues on Gothic cathedrals to which an almost 
grotesque poignancy seems to come by some humble 
accident; a harmony made out of elements of 
frankly apprehended uncouthness, in head, figure, 
and drapery, set to become mutually significant. 
In the Poggio Bracciolini of the Cathedral there is 
the same acceptance of fact, a kind of psychological 
treatment giving its value to this elaborately simple 
dignity. In the St. George we have a kind of com- 
promise, not perhaps for once wholly satisfying, be- 
tween the heroic Greek sculpture and the knightly 
sculpture of the Middle Ages. In medallions of the 
Madonna, and in busts of children (like the St. 
Lawrence of the Sacristy) there is an equal inten- 
sity, in the one of pathos, in the other of innocence, 
in which the feeling and the form are precisely in 
balance; but in works like the wooden statue of the 
Magdalen, the marble statue of John the Baptist, 
and the painted terra-cotta bust of Niccol6 da Uz- 
zano, there is a kind of lean and hungry realism 
which brings a new fierce quality, almost but not 



FLORENCE 141 

quite eager enough to break through the bounds of 
form. The Magdalen is a representation of an 
aged sinner, a kind of Vieille Heaulmiere done very 
literally after nature, and it rivals and excels all 
that has been done in the typically Spanish art of 
wood-carving. In the bust of Niccolo da Uzzano 
experiment is carried further, has recurred to the 
forgotten art of painting sculpture: and the head, 
with the blood in its cheeks, the eyeballs alive under 
the brows, which seems to turn visibly on its wrinkled 
neck and to be about to open its mouth and speak, 
has a terrifying but not really grotesque beauty, 
though indeed a bewildering and exciting thing, 
perhaps too intimately and deceptively human. 

And if, in these masterpieces of an art which has 
seemed ready to give up everything for expression, 
an art in which beauty begins to be as passionately 
troubled as the later art of Botticelli, but for a 
human not for a religious passion, the rhythm of 
life may seem to be in danger of overflowing the 
rhythm of formal beauty, there is at least one piece 
of work, the relief in sandstone of the Annunciation 
in Santa Croce, in which the decorative quality 
comes to be almost everything. Under the frame 
of grey and gold, with laughing and mocking child- 
ren at the top, there is something sumptuous, fantas- 
tically elegant in the elaborate patterns of gold and 
scroll-work, discs, cones, tassels, and, everywhere, 
wings; in the gold at the borders of the robes, and 
at the wrists, and on the angels' shoulders, and in 



142 FLORENCE 

the ribbons that flutter out a wing's length, and on 
the binding of the book which the Virgin holds in her 
hand. In the two exquisite and sensitive figures, 
which stand inside the frame as if inside an open door, 
there is something of the rhythm of Botticelli, with an 
even more personal, alluring, not quite simple grace of 
aspect. Drama and decoration go well together, nei- 
ther losing for the other's sake, in such splendid work 
in relief as the dance of the daughter of Herodias 
in the Baptistery at Siena. Ghiberti's Baptism of 
Christ faces it, on the brighter side of Jacopo della 
Quercia's font, for which it was done; yet even 
Ghiberti seems emphatic and obvious after it. The 
dance is over, Salome has brought in the head, and 
shrinks back, struck suddenly aghast at what she has 
done, while her mother covers her face with her 
hands, and only Herod, unmoved, leans forward and 
looks at the head which a servant hands to him on a 
platter. There is detail, but all serves the illusion 
while it helps the decoration: the table, the dishes, 
the napkin, the windows beyond, and a player with 
a mandolin, and, yet beyond, other idle heads at 
other windows. Here the rhythm is added, like 
a fine transparent garment, to the invention, the 
reality. 

But it is in the Cantoria that all Donatello's 
qualities of abundant and rhythmical life fall and 
flow together, like the sea in its unbroken harmony 
of movement. Wave interlaces wave of laughing 
and leaping children, who dance to a melody which 



FLORENCE 143 

they render visible, and are the only carven things 
in the world that justify Keats when he says in his 
" Ode on a Grecian Urn" : 

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard 
Are sweeter." 

So much music has never been put literally into 
marble. In the Cantoria of Luca della Robbia, over 
against it on the walls of the Bargello, the music, 
though it has been an inspiration, is tamed to an- 
other medium, where it becomes quiescent, an in- 
audible gesture. And there, with all its gracious 
and simple beauty, the whole design remains a 
little formal, does not live equally and with an inner 
life throughout the whole squared and framed series 
of groups. But in Donatello one impulse of exul- 
tation flows and refiows, unchecked, wave-like, 
coming and going with an irresistible joy. And 
there is exquisite and appropriate beauty in the 
whole design of the gallery, with its delicately formal 
vases and shells, its subtle touches of green and 
gold, its blue and orange discs in the under-panels, 
where mosaic is added to marble with a new and 
admirable sense of decoration. The faint mosaic 
background throughout is itself an invention. 
Here, for once, is amplitude of decoration, all that 
the Renaissance ever used or misused, adjusted 
with a perfect sense of the whole, whose outline it 
fills, does not overflow, with all the vitality of 
beauty. 



144 FLORENCE 

II. LEONARDO DA VINCI 

The wisdom and mystery of Leonardo have 
nothing in them akin to Florence, yet it was at 
Florence, as Pater tells us, that ''Leonardo's history 
is the history of his art; he himself is lost in the 
bright cloud of it." It was in Florence, and from 
Verrocchio, that Leonardo learned the desire of 
perfection and the love of toil. But his desires were 
never tangible or limited, he brought to this city of 
clear outline and exquisite finality something which 
could never be contained within the limits that sat- 
isfied it. It was in Florence that what was subtlest 
in his vision came to him, and his model and im- 
age of the soul was found in a Florentine woman; 
though indeed, if the Renaissance made Monna 
Lisa, she is nearer sister to the Sphinx than to Simon- 
etta. In the aspect of Monna Lisa there is more 
than the revelation of life or the creation of form; 
there is a suggestion of something more beautiful 
than the beauty of visible things; she has a secret, 
which she will not tell. To a city so satisfied with 
the world, so content to be alive in a world decorated 
after its pleasure, Leonardo comes as startlingly as 
Savonarola, yet with no mission. Savonarola strips 
off one lovely veil after another from the beauty of 
mortal things, rending them angrily; but Leonardo 
transfigures reality as with a new veil, adding mystery 
to beauty, and awakening a new longing in the mind. 
What he learned from Florence he gave back in a 



FLORENCE 145 

rarer gift, and he remains there, an exception, as he 
must remain always for the whole world, because 
no personality so flawless and so unlimited has yet 
been seen among men. 

In Leonardo da Vinci the desire of perfection was 
organic. He bewildered his contemporaries and 
he has bewildered later students of his life and work 
by a simple, undeviating devotion to the perfect 
achievement of everything to which he set his hand. 
Bandello sums up for us the world's naive astonish- 
ment that any artist should be always ** about his 
father's business" in a narrative of how at one time 
he would stand on his scaffolding, busy painting, 
from morning to night, and then do nothing for 
three or four days but "spend an hour or two in 
contemplating his work, examining and criticising 
his figures," and then, in the heat of the day, walk 
from the other end of Florence, "mount the scaffold- 
ing, seize a brush, add two or three touches to a 
single figure, and return forthwith." In 1501 a 
Carmelite priest in Florence answers the questionings 
of Isabella d' Este: "Leonardo's life," he says, "is 
changeful and uncertain; it is thought that he lives 
only for the day. Since he has been in Florence he 
has worked only on one cartoon. . . . The 
study is not yet complete. . . . He is entirely 
wrapped up in geometry and has no patience for 
painting." For sixteen years he is at work on the 
equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, 
of which all trace has now disappeared ; the portrait 



146 FLORENCE 

of Monna Lisa, after four years' work upon it, seemed 
to him unfinished. And, meanwhile, he has given 
up years to the study of the flight of birds, and an- 
nounces that he has discovered the secret of human 
flight; he has inspected strongholds for Cesare 
Borgia, turned the course of the Arno, invented 
masques and tourneys for the marriage of the Sforzas, 
written his great "Treatise on Painting," and is 
famed for his skill in playing on a lyre of his own 
invention, and for his bodily strength and princely 
manners. At one moment we find an observer 
w^riting of him: "His mathematical experiments 
have withdrawn him from painting to such an extent 
that he cannot endure the sight of a brush." And 
it is after this, when he is already fifty years of age, 
that his great period of painting begins. He worked 
with infinite slowness, and a Quattrocentist poet 
alludes to Leonardo as one who " perhaps excels all 
others, yet cannot tear himself away from a picture, 
and in many years scarce brings one to completion." 
Leonardo aimed at nothing less than finality, and 
when he left his own art for science, or for the at- 
tainment of no matter what end, he was aiming 
at the perfecting of a universal genius, the dream of 
that age, and almost, in him, a literally accomplished 
fact. In a famous letter recommending himself 
to the Duke of Milan, he declares with assurance: 
" I believe that I could equal any other, as regards 
works in architecture, both public and private. I 
can likewise conduct water from one place to an- 



FLORENCE 147 

other. Furthermore, I can execute works in sculp- 
ture, marble, bronze, or terra-cotta. In painting, 
also, I can do what can be done as well as any other, 
be he who he may." Already, at the age of thirty, 
he can say all that with truth, and the passion of 
curiosity, the rage of patient labour, the progress 
along all roads to all ends, is to go on without slack- 
ening to the time of his death, at only a few years 
from seventy. But where Leonardo differs from all 
other seekers after many secrets is in his resolve to 
master each in turn completely, and not to aban- 
don any one, even after it has been solved. He is 
the Don Juan of knowledge, who has never for- 
saken a mistress, and for whom no mistress has 
been unfruitful. 

And the reason of this is that he is moved not 
by any abstract desire of culture, but by pure 
curiosity, a quite simple desire of all experience and 
all beauty. Leonardo's supreme aim was at the 
perfecting of himself, himself as one of the fine 
arts. It is for this that he seems to forsake the 
chief task set before him, that he is content to seem 
like one who has lost his way : the way is nothing to 
him; the end and the way are always with him, for 
he himself is both the end and the way. 

"A good painter," said Leonardo, "has two chief 
objects to paint: man and the intentions of his soul. 
The former is easy, the latter hard, for it must be 
expressed by gesture and movements of the limbs." 
And he says elsewhere: "That figure is not good 



148 FLORENCE 

which does not express through its gestures the 
passions of its soul." Thus he becomes, more than 
any other painter, the painter of the soul. The soul 
of beautiful women or beautiful youths seemed to 
become visible to him in a certain smile of the lips 
and eyes, and in the subtle movement of the wrist 
and fingers. He has created, not only in the Gio- 
conda, a clairvoyant smile, which is the smile of 
a mysterious wisdom hidden in things. He paints 
lips which, if they spoke, could but say, by the 
mere using of words, some less essential thing, some 
less intimate secret of the soul. No other painter 
has, like Leonardo, painted wisdom. What other 
painters, if they attempt to render, attempt to 
render by symbols, Leonardo draws, by some en- 
chantment, out of reluctant lips and eyes and 
hands, and, by the gesture of the body, speaks the 
passions of the soul. 

That "there can be no perfect beauty without 
some strangeness in the proportion" would have 
been conceded by Leonardo, who, indeed, advised 
artists to look for something in nature which is 
beyond nature, not only in faces and bodies, but in 
veined marble, in the stains on walls, in the shapes 
of clouds, and in water and fire. His pictures are 
disquieting to those not immediately and wholly 
responsive to them ; the eyes of Monna Lisa, as they 
follow you about the Salon Carre of the Louvre, 
seem to be asking some seductive and impenetrable 
question, on which all one's happiness may depend. 



FLORENCE 149 

In the followers of Leonardo, this almost perverse 
subtlety of innocence becomes mannered; ** pious 
and sweet, as is their style," to apply a phrase used 
of Leonardo himself by Isabella d' Este. It is sig- 
nificant that the word which comes first to one's 
lips in speaking of Leonardo should be the word 
grace, and not, as with Michelangelo, strength, or, 
as with Raphael, skill. In Michelangelo, strength 
frequently becomes grace; in Leonardo, grace itself 
becomes intensified to something which is beyond 
the utmost strength. Now the artist should never 
consciously aim at strength; but, conscious of his 
strength, he should aim at the utmost subtlety of 
beauty. Leonardo, in his pictures, as in his precepts, 
aims at nothing less than perfection; that is, the 
balance of every quality. Now grace is perfect 
balance, grace being all that need appear in strength 
in action. 

What I mean will be quite clear if I recall two 
Greek marbles which I once saw in a private exhi- 
bition in London. In one, the head of an old man, 
strength went as far as strength could go without 
being changed into some further and higher sub- 
stance. The truth and energy of this head, gnarled 
and wry, with its insistence on all the cavities and 
disgraces of age, on the falling to pieces of the once 
shapely house of life, are only to be compared, in 
Greek work, with the drunken old woman in the Glyp- 
tothek at Munich, or in modern work, with *'La 
vieille Heaulmiere" of Rodin. The drunken woman 



I50 FLORENCE 

is, indeed, a more "furrowing lesson in life,'* as she 
sits hugging her wine-jar; you see the rocky shoul- 
der blades, the pits sunk under the collar-bones, 
the wrinkled hollows under the lifted chin, the nose 
drawn upwards by the senile movement of the mouth 
which still thirsts. In the old man, once thought 
to be Seneca, you have still the restraining force of 
a will which endures age and pain with gravity. 
But consider, in this sculptor's work, the point to 
which strength and the desire of truth have carried 
it. There is truth and there is strength, and there 
is the beauty which grows up inevitably out of a 
sufficiently powerful truth. But let us look across 
at another head, the head of a woman, which does 
not seem clever at all; which seems, as one first 
catches sight of it, curiously simple, as if the diffi- 
culties of the art of sculpture had been evaded rather 
than conquered, yet which ravishes the mind into a 
certain quiet and fulness of delight. The modelling 
is nowhere obvious: every outline is smoothed and 
rounded, nothing leaps out upon one and seizes an 
unwilling admiration. You do not notice it for 
strength, for any ingenious mastery of any evident 
difficulty. Venus rose so out of the waters, when 
human beauty came consciously into the world, 
not startling any one, but like a dream which has 
come true. The forehead and cheeks are no subtler 
than a flower; the neck, in its breadth from chin to 
nape, has no refinements upon an actual neck in 
which one has felt life rather than seen beauty. 



FLORENCE 151 

The eyes and lips settle down into no fixed expression 
by which one can remember them; but some 
infinitely mysterious expression seems to flow 
through them as through the eyes and lips of a 
woman's head by Leonardo. And you will see what 
is not in the other head, the lack of which leaves it 
where it is : something incalculable, something which 
begins where truth leaves off, something which 
transfigures truth. 

And I am not sure that you will not find this 
something in the bronze of "La vieille Heaulmiere" 
in the Luxembourg Gallery. Wasted, ruinous, 
''lean, wizen, like a small dry tree," this piteous 
body remembers the body it had when it was young, 
and the beauty is still there, in the lovely skeleton 
that shows right through the flesh, in the delicate 
contours of the almost hairless head, in the indestruc- 
tible grace of the profile. This "poor old Hght 
woman" is more tragic than the old drunken woman 
of the Munich Gallery; but, as one looks at the old 
drunken woman, one sees only the sordid pity of 
things as they are, while * 'La vieille Heaulmiere" is 
saying "Thus endeth all the beauty of us," as it 
can be said only by those who have fastened "the 
sweet yoke" of beauty upon the necks of the world. 

Our time is the time in which men seem to them- 
selves to have first discovered the beauty of ugly and 
of common things. There is a whole modern litera- 
ture, and there is a whole modern art, and even 
music, in which men have set themselves to be ugly 



152 FLORENCE 

with intention, as they once set themselves to the 
more difficult achievement of beauty. They forget 
that there is nothing so twisted in nature or in men's 
brains that has not been drawn by some Eastern 
weaver of patterns, or carved by some Western ape 
of life. What all but a few men of genius have for- 
gotten in all ages is that beauty is in no literal ren- 
dering of anything, Venus or the satyr ; but may wash 
like a flood of air over either Venus or the satyr, 
making either beautiful. It is enough to compare any 
grotesque and evil head in the best of Beardsley's 
drawings with Leonardo's head of Judas in the 
Windsor Library, or with one of those bitter and 
malevolent heads full of insane fury and the energy 
of the beasts, which he scattered over the pages of 
his sketch-book. These have a beauty not less 
restrained, in its poised and perfected violence, 
than the beauty of mysterious peace which broods 
over the "Virgin of the Rocks." To Beardsley the 
thing drawn must remain ugly through all the beauty 
of the drawing, and must hurt. The sculptor of 
the woman's head, if he had done the head of the 
old man, would have lost nothing that is character- 
istic in the grimace of eyes and mouth, but he would 
have touched it with I know not what magic in his 
fingers, and it would have ravished us, like the other, 
into some quiet heaven of delight. 

Then, in this transfiguring art of Leonardo, there 
is, in every picture, not only a thing of perfectly 
achieved beauty, but a new thing. We see him, 



FLORENCE 153 

before every one else, inventing landscape, inventing 
a whole new movement for an equestrian statue; 
inventing the first wholly simple and natural treat- 
ment of the Virgin and Child; inventing, in the 
Gioconda, a new art of portrait-painting, in which a 
woman's soul is, for the first time, seen smiling. He 
was content to do nothing as it had been done 
before, as he was content to do nothing without 
perfection. 

"It is thought," said the Carmelite, "that he 
lives only for the day." Leonardo has the patience 
of one who, instigated by continual inspiration, 
knows that inspiration is an impulse, not an ac- 
complishment. More than others, he waited on it, 
yet without abandoning himself to a too confident 
repose in its first promptings. It was part of his 
genius to know how to leave off working and how to 
return to work. He gives you in a picture nothing 
but inspiration, because he fills up the inevitable 
gaps and intervals by a calculated absence, and the 
achievement of other tasks. He returns to his idea 
again and again, as his sketches show us, supple- 
menting inspiration by a finer inspiration; never 
weary, yet never perhaps satisfied. As he achieved 
more than others so he desired more; and in the most 
eloquent words which he wrote he has said an 
epilogue over the passing of all earthly beauty " O 
Time! consumer of all things; O envious age! thou 
dost destroy all things and devour all things with the 
relentless teeth of years, little by little, in a slow 



154 FLORENCE 

death. Helen, when she looked in her mirror, seeing 
the withered wrinkles made in her face by old age, 
wept and wondered why she had twice been carried 
away." 



III. A TRIUMPH OF LORENZO DE' MEDICI 



While Leonardo was thus pitying the fate of 
men and women in the old age of Helen, and saying, 
for his own comfort, that *' lovely mortal things 
pass, but not art," Florence was rejoicing, with only 
momentary after- thoughts, in its newly awakened 
consciousness of what could be done to colour and 
inspirit life, day by day, in an existence lived after 
what seemed to be the blithe Greek pattern. It 
was Lorenzo de' Medici who gave the liveliest ut- 
terance to this new Paganism and set down most 
definitely, in a lovely form, f or a " Triumph of Bac- 
chus and Ariadne," no doubt charioted gallantly 
through the streets, the conclusion of the age. His 
verses, which I have translated very literally, mark 
a stage, and are a necessary part, of my interpreta- 
tion of Florence. 



What a lovely thing this Youth is, 
If but Youth would always stay so ! 
You'd be happy? be to-day so, 
In to-morrow's tale no truth is. 



FLORENCE 155 

Here is Bacchus, and beside him 
Ariadne, lovely, loving; 
Time flies, yet, although they chide him, 
Their love moves not with his moving. 
Nymphs and fauns and all folk roving 
Are for ever blithe and gay so. 
You'd be happy? be to-day so, 
In to-morrow's tale no truth is. 



All these little jolly satyrs, 
Following on the nymphs to find them, 
Have in forests and in caverns 
Laid a hundred snares to bind them; 
Heats of Bacchus urge and blind them 
Till they dance and leap astray so. 
You'd be happy? be to-day so, 
In to-morrow's tale no truth is. 



And the little nymphs are grateful 
By their satyrs to be singled; 
Who, that is not foul and hateful, 
Would put out a fire Love kindled? 
All together, mixed and mingled. 
Feast their youth and years away so. 
You'd be happy? be to-day so, 
In to-morrow's tale no truth is. 

Next Silenus follows, sunken 
On the ass's back, a burthen; 
He is gay and old and drunken. 
Years of fatness bind his girth in, 



156 FLORENCE 

Heaping loads of wine and mirth in, 
Till he can but laugh and sway so. 
You'd be happy? be to-day so, 
In to-morrow's tale no truth is. 



Midas follows, and his seizure 
Turns to gold all things created. 
But what pleasure to have treasure 
When desire is unabated? 
With what water shall be sated 
Thirst no sweetness can allay so? 
You'd be happy? be to-day so, 
In to-morrow's tale no truth is. 

Open ears wide, every creature: 
None can count upon to-morrow. 
But to-day we all and each are 
Ready, old and young, to borrow 
Present joy from coming sorrow. 
Feast our youth and years away so! 
You'd be happy? be to-day so. 
In to-morrow's tale no truth is. 

Youths and maidens, every lover. 
Long live love and long live Bacchus ! 
When the song and dance are over, 
Though love's burning sweetness rack us, 
Toil and care shall never track us. 
That which must be shall be aye so. 
You'd be happy? be to-day so, 
In to-morrow's tale no truth is. 
What a lovely thing this Youth is, 
If but Youth would always stay so ! 



FLORENCE 157 

IV. DANTE AND BOTTICELLI 

The earlier work of Botticelli is like an illustration 
of that characteristically Renaissance ideal of the 
painter which we find developed throughout the 
whole of Leon Battista Alberti's book on painting; 
and it is in this book that the story of the '* Calumny 
of Apelles" is related, as a subject for painters, 
precisely as Botticelli was to paint it. To Alberti's 
theories we must add that new poetry, with its 
ancient symbolism and its fresh Spring graces, which 
was being written by Poliziano and by Lorenzo de* 
Medici. There is little doubt that in the so-called 
''Mars and Venus " of the National Gallery we have a 
composition suggested by the " Stanze per la Giostra" 
of Poliziano, in which Giuliano de' Medici and la 
bella Simonetta are commemorated ; and the '' Prima- 
vera" has sometimes been taken to be an illustra- 
tion of another of his poems, though indeed it sums 
up in a visible image the whole Spring poetry of the 
Renaissance. All this poetry, like all Botticelli's 
earlier work, is a literal new birth of Paganism ; and 
Botticelli captures the Greek spirit, not, as Raphael 
did, by an ardent scholarship, seizing upon the 
actual forms and the supposed "classic" feeling of 
Greek sculpture, of the "Three Graces" for instance, 
in the Cathedral Library at Siena, but by creating a 
new antiquity of his own over again in Florence, 
putting his town folk in holiday attire into it, and 
seeing Simonetta as a Tangara, unconsciously. The 



158 FLORENCE 

youth of Greece came back to him by an accidental 
relationship of the eyes and hand, and by a genius 
for interpreting slight hints, and re-creating them 
in a new, fantastic, or fanciful way of his own. He 
has the secret of the Greek rhythm, and nothing in 
his feeling comes to break or disturb that rhythm. 
Whether he paints the birth of Venus or of Christ, 
he has the same indifference and curiosity: each is 
a picture to him. The pensive unconcern, what 
looks like weariness or vague trouble, in the face of 
the Virgin, is not so conscious a thinking into it of 
such speculations as Pater finds there (and finds, for 
us if not for BotticeUi, rightly), but an expression 
chosen for its charm, its melancholy grace, by one 
who gave it equally to Venus rising sadly out of the 
waves, and to the Virgin enthroned and indifferent 
among angels, or holding her child like an idle or 
heavy toy. Judith going home through the midst 
of her enemies, with the sword and olive-branch in 
her hand, Truth in the *' Calumny," Simonetta in 
the picture in London, have all the same look of 
exquisite weariness, as of those who do or endure 
great things in a dream, and are all hypnotised by 
the same meditation, which is really the soul of 
their visible beauty. And Botticelli sets gravity 
and sadness in their eyes and lips as he sets jewels 
of gold on the dress, and curls the hair into curves 
lovelier than the curves of shells. 

Vasari tells us that under the influence of Savon- 
arola Botticelli for a time ''totally abandoned 



FLORENCE 159 

painting." In the ** Nativity" in the National Gal- 
lery we see the effect of that influence upon his art 
when he went back to it. The Christian convention, 
which he had accepted as a part of his design just 
as he accepted the convention of the Venus de 
Medici for his own Venus, is wholly abandoned; for 
he has now a new, personal, fantastical interest in the 
thing itself, and in his own apocalyptic interpre- 
tation of it; he invents a new form, in which the 
suavity is replaced by an ecstasy, and men and 
angels meet and embrace with uncontrollable emo- 
tion, and little devils from Hell hide like snakes 
among the clefts of the rocks. A new quality has 
come into his work, troubling it, and giving it a 
new, restless beauty, certainly Christian at last. 
His design hardens, losing something of its decora- 
tive beauty; the rhythm contracts, the pensive 
expression in the faces becomes a personal trouble ; 
and in the '*Pieta" at Munich (if it is really his) 
there is almost the grimace of over-strung emotion, 
as in the S. Zenobio panels there is a hurry of move- 
ment which is almost feverish. 

It is in this later, mystical period that most 
writers have preferred to place the greater part of 
Botticelli's drawings to the ''Divine Comedy," and 
some have even imagined him to have been occupied 
on them to the very end of his life, during those last 
years which may not have been so dejected, as we 
know now that they were not so long drawn out, as 
Vasari has said. Savonarola did not come to 



i6o FLORENCE 

Florence till 1482, and there can be little doubt 
that Botticelli had begun his drawings before 148 1, 
though in that year he must, for a time, have laid 
them aside, to paint the frescoes in the Sistine 
Chapel. In 1481 an edition of Dante was published 
at Florence by Christoforo Landino, containing, in 
addition to his commentary, a number of engravings, 
varying in different copies from two to twenty. 
These engravings, clumsily and badly done as they 
are, we now know to have been done by some inferior 
craftsman who had seen, and who tried to imitate, 
Botticelli's earlier designs to the *' Inferno." They 
end with the nineteenth canto; and, as the book 
appeared in August, 1481, and we know that Botti- 
celli went to Rome early in that year, it would 
appear that he had got so far, and no further, with 
his drawings, and that the printer could not wait 
for his return. Their chief -value for us is that 
they give us, in their prints to the eight cantos of 
the "Inferno" for which Botticelli's drawings are 
missing, some faint, fragmentary, and distorted 
idea of w^hat those designs may have been. 

The first edition of Dante's "Divine Comedy" 
was printed in 1472, but manuscript copies still 
continued to be made for rich collectors, who would 
have been ashamed to possess so renowned a book 
in any less costly and beautiful a shape. We know 
from an anonymous manuscript of the tenth century, 
in the National Library at Florence, that Botticelli 



FLORENCE i6i 

"painted and pictured a Dante on parchment for 
Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de' Medici, which was 
accounted a marvellous thing." Of this Lorenzo, 
who died in 1503, we know also that he commissioned 
a youthful statue of John the Baptist from Michel- 
angelo. It was not until the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century that the drawings of Botticelli were 
known to exist in the collection of the Duke of 
Hamilton. At the Hamilton sale in 1882 they were 
bought by the Berlin Museum. There are eighty- 
eight sheets of parchment, one of which is double, 
and contains a single design; three sheets contain 
no design. The text is written on one side of the 
parchment, in six columns, each sheet containing a 
whole canto; and on the other side the designs are 
sketched with silver-point, and finished in black 
or brown ink: each design faces the canto which it 
illustrates. A single page ("Inferno," xviii.) is 
painted in body-colour. Seven more sheets, con- 
taining eight more drawings belonging to the same 
series, were afterwards discovered in the Vatican 
Library: the chart of Hell, the illustration to canto 
i., drawn on either side of the same sheet, and the 
illustrations to cantos ix., x., xii., xiii., xv., and 
xvi. of the "Inferno." Two of these sheets are 
wholly, and one partly, coloured, as if in imitation 
of the illuminated manuscripts of the time. No 
texts or designs have been found to cantos ii. to 
vii., or xi. and xiv., of the " Inferno" ; of canto xxxi. 



i62 FLORENCE 

of the " Paradise " there is only the text; the drawing 
for canto xxxii. is scarcely begun, and there is neither 
text nor drawing for the last canto. ^ 

The earlier designs, most indeed of those to the 
"Inferno," are more crowded, more literal and ex- 
act in their following of every detail, more casually 
composed, in their setting of a series of episodes 
layer above layer, than the later ones; and it is 
only as he moves upward from Hell through Purga- 
tory to Heaven that Botticelli becomes wholly master 
of his material, wholly himself. Vasari tells us that, 
after painting the frescoes at Rome, he squandered 
"the considerable sum of money" which he had had 
from the Pope, and "returned at once to Florence, 
where, being whimsical and eccentric, he occu- 
pied himself with commenting on a certain part of 
Dante, illustrating the *' Inferno," and executing 
prints, over which he wasted much time, and, neglect- 
ing his proper occupation, he did no work, and 
thereby caused infinite disorder in his affairs." 
We may thus reasonably suppose that the drawings 
begun before 1481 were continued within the course 
of the next year or two; and nothing is more likely 
than that the work was continued, at intervals, 
during many years. Yet I see no reason for sup- 
posing that any part of it was done after the fatal 

1 A facsimile reproduction of all the drawings has been pub- 
lished in folio, under the care of Dr. F. Lippmann, by G. Grote, 
Berlin (1887), and, reduced to half the size of the originals, by- 
Lawrence and Bullen (1896), with an introduction and com- 
mentary by the same editor, and slightly reduced facsimiles of 
the twenty engravings of 148 1. 



FLORENCE 163 

influence of Savonarola had drawn the painter out 
of his sufficing artificial paradise into the regions 
of "the Second Woe of the Apocalypse." Is there, 
in any part of the drawings, a suggestion of that 
harder later technique which we find in the ** Nativity" 
of 1500, or of the harsh energy which we find in the 
S. Zenobio panels? Is there, in the faithful and 
literal record of Dante's poem, with its simple ac- 
ceptance of fact and its more and more gracious 
economy of line, any of the later Christian feeling, 
grown sad, painful, and acute, the sort of fanatic- 
ism which he seems to have caught from Savona- 
rola, and implanted in his latest pictures? I think 
not: though I think I can see, in this ardent study 
of Dante, one of the ways leading Botticelli to 
Savonarola. 

To an artist of the Renaissance the Hell and 
Purgatory of Dante would be infinitely more diffi- 
cult to illustrate than those subjects of ancient 
mythology which had their own classic conventions. 
The Hell of the Campo Santo and of the mediaeval 
illuminators would seem to him a convention not 
yet consecrated by tradition, and without any 
pictorial probability to his own mind. He could 
but draw literally, following Dante's words without 
seeing his pictures through the same fierce and 
minute ecstasy of imagination. Has any Italian 
painter really had a fine sense of the grotesque? 
Probably Michelangelo, in those priceless drawings 
which went down in the ship off Civitavecchia, put 



i64 FLORENCE 

sublimity into Dante, as Blake has done in our own 
age, and by a method of interpretation perhaps not 
wholly different. But is Dante really sublime in 
the Miltonic sense, or in the sense in which some 
of Blake's drawings are sublime? I do not feel that 
he is. His imagination is severe, precise, definite; 
he sees in hard outline, by flashes, certainly, but 
without any of the heightening of atmosphere. The 
vision of Milton is a kind of second sight, perhaps a 
blind man's pageant of *'men as trees walking"; 
Shakespeare too sees in metaphors, through the 
suggestion of words, in their subtle colouring of out- 
line; but to Dante everything is in profile, and his 
words are always as if graven in the white marble 
which he saw in Purgatory, 

** Come figura in cera si sugella." 
Thus I think that when Botticelli is at his best, 
and when he allows himself room to be quite clear, 
and does not try to put a whole canto into a single 
design, the form in which he renders Dante is really 
the form in which Dante should be rendered. The 
" Inferno" he is not always able to turn into beautiful 
shapes, because of what Pater has noticed, "that 
the words of a poet, which only feebly present an 
image to the mind, must be lowered in key when 
translated into form"; but in much of the ''Pur- 
gatorio" and most of the "Paradiso" there is little 
but his piety or fidelity to hinder him. The almost 
monkish piety with which he follows his sacred text, 
not daring to put his own private interpretation in 



FLORENCE 165 

the place of a strictly literal, an orthodox one, is 
like that of a missal-painter, decorating verse after 
verse of the Scriptures, as if actually in the margins 
of his text; with a monk's patience also, but with a 
quite Pagan sense of beauty, a lyrical quality of 
design, which was wholly typical of the Renaissance. 
It is perhaps in his character of the pious monk, 
working for the glory of God on his missal, that he 
writes in minute letters on the banner of one of his 
young angels, in his drawing of the nine heavenly 
orders, each with its name written in the margin, 
his own name, " Sandro di Mariano," as if numbering 
his place among them before the time. 

Botticelli's Hell, like Dante's, is a place of gross 
physical torture, in which the Devil is exactly as 
Dante saw him, a child's ideal of horror, with his 
three Gargantuan heads each *' champing a sin- 
ner" between its separate fangs. The beauty which 
comes into even this design comes by a skill of hand 
which draws lovely lines for the articulations of the 
fingers and of the bats' wings. There is rarely a 
beauty wholly appropriate to the subject, and 
directly conditioned by it, but rather a struggle 
between the nature of the task and the means used 
to turn it into a picture. Sometimes, as in the 
illustration to canto xxii., decoration comes into 
the design with the barbed spears and bats' wings 
of devils, and the grouping of the tormented figures 
and their tormentors, and the lonely Hne of sooth- 
sayers pacing at the edge of the chasm above the 



i66 FLORENCE 

lake. Coiled snakes twist and voyage across certain 
designs in intricate arabesques, and Geryon has a 
kind of morbid elegance in his curved scales, and 
there are two very decorative pages ornamented 
with nothing but spiring flames. But there are 
others which struggle confusedly with horror, or are a 
kind of map, or algebraical signs; and there is no 
intimacy or subtlety in their rendering of the evil 
powers of nature, nothing that does not lose rather 
than gain from its subject, and no accidental beauty 
that would not be more in keeping with either Purga- 
tory or Paradise. 

With the ''Purgatorio" Dante leaves more room 
to his illustrator, and Botticelli gradually ceases to 
be the slave of his text. Occasionally he takes a 
casual word very literally, as in the eighteenth 
canto, where he sets all the slothful biting at their 
own flesh. But in the next canto he shrinks from 
rendering the horrible details of the Siren, "quella 
antica strega," as he would certainly have done, 
with careful fidelity, in the "Inferno." In at least 
one design, the fifteenth, he has frankly continued 
his own rendering of a scene, without going on with 
Dante's continuation of it; and the design which 
he repeats, with changes, is, in its first form, as an 
illustration to the fourteenth canto, one of the 
subtlest and most emotional of them all, with some- 
thing, in the row of blind beggars huddled against 
the rocks, of the emotional quality of Blake. He is 
not always careful to take the opportunities that 



FLORENCE 167 

Dante gives him; and thus, in the second canto, 
Casella is only the most robust of a number of naked 
shapes; in the fifth, la Pia is uncommemorated, 
though the design has many figures, and we remem- 
ber that canto only for her few lines; and Rachel 
and Leah are not to be seen in the twenty-seventh, 
though the twenty-eighth is wholly given up to 
Matilda gathering flowers in Eden, and is one of the 
most beautiful of all the designs, in its almost Japan- 
ese arrangement, between the straight tree-trunks. 
There is spiritual meaning, as well as gracious 
arabesque, in the beautiful bodies of those who have 
sinned through love, and now strive to re-embrace 
among the flames; and a loveliness of line which is 
itself its own sufficient meaning in the two nudes of 
canto iv., one seated, with his arms about his knees, 
and the other turning slowly in the foreground, and 
in the nude figure in the seventh canto seated with his 
back to the hollow of the valley where the spirits of 
kings rest on the grass. In all these there is that 
delight in the beauty of bodies which is so Greek in 
Botticelli, and in the elaborate design in many 
compartments which illustrates canto x. there is 
more of his delight in moving draperies, and people 
dancing, and straight lances, and the crowd and 
trampling of horsemen, and a spirit like the Pagan 
or Renaissance spirit of the "Birth of Venus" or the 
* 'Spring. " It is in the series of ' ' triumphs ' ' in which 
he realises, exactly as Dante had planned it, but with 
what pictorial ecstasy, the pageant of the Car of 



i68 FLORENCE 

Beatrice, that we see his design most triumphant, 
most characteristically his own. Is not the first 
perhaps the finest in its simplicity, its sweep of 
design: the lower curve of the river Lethe like a 
floating pennant, and the upper curves of the seven 
pennants of smoke blown back and carried round 
from the seven candlesticks borne by angels? And 
yet is not the second more splendid, more sumptuous, 
in its immensely rich and intricate network of dec- 
oration, woven with precise and delicate detail into 
a texture and pattern seen as clearly and as raptur- 
ously as Dante's? 

In his vision of the Car of Beatrice Dante's imagery 
is, as Botticelli's design proves to us, marvellously 
pictorial. For the most part what may be called his 
larger imagery is mediaeval, and, though distinctly 
visualised, has much of the mediaeval uncouthness; 
as, for instance, in the eagle of canto xx. of the 
''Paradiso," made up of so many saints, five to the 
arch of the eyebrow. His smaller imagery, all 
those similes by which he shows us the reflection 
before we see the thing, have on the contrary a 
homely naturalness which sets us wondering after- 
wards how so simple a statement of fact can have 
turned into such great poetry. Think of all that 
poets have said about night, and then hear Dante: 

" La notte che le cose ci nasconde" 

''Night that hides things from us." While both 
Milton and Shakespeare are constantly saying things 



FLORENCE 169 

for effect, and letting them dazzle us, Dante's style 
requires no heightening, no matter what he has to 
say, and it is on the same level of speech that he 
writes, of the church bells, 

"Tin tin sonando con si dolce nota" 

and, of the ineffable vision of the Virgin ensapphir- 
ing brightest heaven with lovely sapphire, 
** Onde si coronova il be! zaffiro 
Del quale il ciel piu chiaro s'inzafiira ** 

It is always by their little details, the details that 
make things clear to the sight, that he names them; 
as, when Matilda looks up from the flowers she is 
gathering, he says of her that she turned ''like a 
lady dancing, who turns with the soles of her feet 
close to the ground, and scarcely sets foot before 
foot." How beautiful that is in drawing, how like 
Botticelli, who, though he does not illustrate exactly 
that attitude, might seem to remember the words 
when, in the fifth canto of the *' Paradiso, " he draws 
the naked feet of Beatrice, set delicately together, 
like a pigeon's preparing to alight. And it is in the 
"Paradiso" chiefly that Botticelli seems to melt into 
the very spirit of Dante, purifying it, sometimes, of 
those "corollaries" and "deductions" which are apt 
to turn heaven into a wrangling hell of the schoolmen. 
Throughout the main part of the "Paradiso" 
Botticelli gives us, in his designs, only two figures, 
Dante and Beatrice, whether because he did not 
finish his drawings, or whether, as I would rather 



170 FLORENCE 

think, he saw that the main significance of the book 
is concentrated upon the celestial relations of Dante 
and Beatrice, now at once actual and lyrical. And 
so he gives us circle after circle with only these two 
figures, sometimes set into a sky of starry flames, 
sometimes detached against mere emptiness of light ; 
disregarding incidents or persons who, in the poem, 
break a little upon its divine monotony. Even 
Cunizza in the amorous sphere is only seen in the 
half-closed eyes of Dante under the light of her 
presence, and in his hand uplifted in joyous surprise. 
And in the circle of the sun he does but shield 
his eyes against overpowering light, not seeing S. 
Thomas Aquinas and the other doctors of the Church. 
Even the birds who make D and I and L with their 
flight, and the M of wings twined with lilies, do not 
tempt Botticelli out of his reticence. But every 
motion of the soul and speech of Dante and Beatrice 
is rendered with subtle fidelity in some gesture, some 
turn of the head or hands, some lifting of the eyelids 
or parting of the lips, with a restraint like Dante's, 
and like no other gesture in Italian poetry or painting. 
Think of Italian gesture, even of Leonardo's in the 
"Last Supper." In every canto Botticelli makes a 
new marvel of the folds of Beatrice's robe; every 
movement is studied so as to set the lines into some 
new arrangement, in which, as in '* Venus " and the 
''Spring," hands and feet and hair have their part 
in the rhythm. 

Like a pearl on a white forehead, or the reflection 



FLORENCE 171 

of faces seen in clear water: it is Dante's image for 
the aspect of certain spiritual realities as they come 
to him in one of the circles of Heaven, and Botticelli 
has drawn many of these designs to the " Paradiso," 
and some among the more elaborate ones which 
begin with the twenty-first canto, with just such 
faintness and precision. There are delicious nai- 
vetes, as in the second head which grows on Dante's 
shoulders, looking backwards, because in the poem 
he turns ; and in the face of Beatrice, which is changed 
into a tragic mask, where, in the poem, she refrains 
from smiling, lest the radiance of the seventh 
heaven, drawn into her eyes, should shrivel Dante 
into ashes. In this design, that of Jacob's ladder, 
there is a whirl of baby angels like flowers or birds 
(the daws of Dante's simile), in which little bodies 
drunk with light fly exquisitely, as birds do, turning 
upon themselves in the air in their vehemence of 
delight. And Botticelli has repeated this note of 
rapture in his last almost completed design, where 
we see the river of light, its banks ''painted with 
marvellous Spring," and the "living sparks," like 
winged infants, plunging head foremost into the 
blossoms, and then whirling, drunk with odours, 
into the river out of the "smiling of the grasses." 
In Botticelli's fidelity to Dante I find something 
of Dante's fidelity to nature, and with the same 
exquisitely personal art. Only Wordsworth, occa- 
sionally, among poets, gets the inevitable magic 
of a statement which is at once completely truthful 



172 FLORENCE 

and completely beautiful: Dante gets it in almost 
every statement. Wordsworth's line, spoken of 
Milton : 

" Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart." 
might render the essence and secret of Dante, as a 
writer of verse, better than most translations of his 
whole poem. And in Botticelli we find a minutely 
beautiful truth like that of Dante, and in his choice 
of pure outline to convey Dante's vision a choice 
wholly appropriate. Reading Dante over again, 
canto by canto, and turning from the poem to the 
drawings, I find Dante more beautiful, seeing him 
through Botticelli's eyes, and I find in Botticelli 
a beauty wholly his own, a creation comparable 
with Dante's, in an art which Dante envied. 



RAVENNA 



J73 



RAVENNA 

I 

Entering Ravenna, I seemed to be pentrating 
into emptiness. Here not a house seems alive; 
there is an odour in the air which is like the smell 
of earth or of graves ; the people shiver in the streets, 
or walk muffled to the mouth in ample cloth cloaks 
with collars of fur; there is a feverish red in the 
hollow cheeks, and a brightness of fever in the eyes. 
After Venice, where I had seen strong and com- 
fortable men, naked to the waist, carrying heavy 
burdens between the wharves and the ships, one 
seemed to have come into a city of sick people. 
And the city, too, is as if worn out, languid with 
fever; it has not aged gracefully. Its miraculous 
mosaics, so nearly unaging, are housed inside rough 
walls, through which the damp creeps, staining 
the marble columns with strange, lovely colours of 
decay. The streets are chill, narrow corridors for 
the wind; earth-coloured, left to accumulate the 
natural dinginess of things. Here and there a 
great basilica, a tower, the fragment of an ancient 
palace, stands up in the corner of an empty piazza 
or rises out of a cluster of dull-brown roofs. The 
Cathedral square is half overgrown with grass ; grass 

175 



176 RAVENNA 

grows up the six steps in front of the one old and 
solid house there ; all around the red plaster is peeling 
off the walls; through two of the five roads which 
lead out of the square you see the green and brown 
of trees and the dingy beginnings of the city wall. 
On market-day Ravenna awakens for a whole 
morning. The people come in great numbers 
through all the gates of the city, on foot, and in 
their tiny carts slung together with netted string. 
The Piazza Vittorio Emanuele is thronged with 
rough, red, wrinkled peasants, mufHed in their 
great cloaks, and in the Piazza Dante Alighieri, which 
opens out of it, there is a sort of small fair. Stalls 
are set up all over the rocky ground ; cloths of bright 
colour, especially certain fiery yellows and reds, are 
heaped upon them ; they hang in strips, blazing in the 
midst of dull hanks of hemp, of wooden utensils, of 
earthenware, of beaten copper. Women with bright 
handkerchiefs over their heads, with something red 
always in kerchief or bodice, stand at the stalls ; there 
is a slow heaving of people to and fro in the square. 
The women who pass have serious yet slightly ironical 
faces, sometimes with that steady, ambiguous look 
which one sees in the Jewess and in the gipsy. They 
hold themselves proudly, like conscious animals, 
differing (how strangely!) from the Venetians, their 
neighbours, who are unconscious animals. It is all 
a little sombre and feverish; there is no gaiety, no 
lightness, but rather something serious, almost un- 
easy, in the watchful aspect of the people. 



RAVENNA 177 

II 

All life forsakes Ravenna, which lives on with 
an unholy charm, like one really dead, kept in a 
semblance of life by witchcraft. The sea has ebbed 
from it, life has ebbed out of it, splendour and power 
have forsaken it ; it remains the lovely and unhappy 
ghost of itself. The streets themselves are as if 
cut out of the ground : they have the colour and chill 
feeling of the earth ; the sun rarely soaks into them : 
one seems to be walking in a city dug up out of ruins. 
There is a strange, shivering silence everywhere; 
in these roughly paved streets on wh^ch there is so 
rarely a sound of wheels or of footsteps; in these 
vast and solid houses, from behind whose bars and 
shutters so few faces look out ; in these empty squares, 
these sumptuous churches with closed doors, opened 
for curious strangers; these great gateways shutting 
in the city upon itself. And light, when it comes 
into the city, is itself disquieting. Sometimes, after 
a day's resignation or dull waiting, Ravenna begins 
to awaken, like a convalescent, as the afternoon 
brightens towards sunset. Seen from the walls 
the colours of the sky seem to soak down upon the 
city ; it flushes, seems to respond to the light. Stand- 
ing in the Piazza Byron at sunset, one sees the red 
walls of the Church of S. Francesco, as if flaming 
against a sky from which the fires of sunset are 
reflected; every leaf of the little tree that stands 
in the corner of the square burns with a separate 



178 RAVENNA 

flame, and the red glow extends to the tomb of 
Braccioforte, where Dante lies buried among the 
sarcophagi. 

Ravenna is full of ancient monuments which 
seem to last on, after so unthinkably many centuries, 
like very old people, blind and deaf and feeble in 
hands and feet, who still sit by the hearth of their 
old homes, dressed in ancient finery, and tolerating 
the youth of the world with an impeccable courtesy. 
They frighten the younger people a little, who feel 
their own flimsy modernness, and a youth which is 
not likely to grow distinguished, as they consider 
the ghastly beauty of their ancestors. 

In Ravenna there are the tombs of all the ages: 
sarcophagi of the early martyrs of the Church, the 
sepulchre of Theodoric, King of the Goths, the tomb 
of Dante. Has any structure in which people were 
to live ever lasted so long as those in which for so 
much longer (as, in their wisdom, they realised) they 
were to lie dead? There are only a few arches and 
a few broken walls left of the palace of Theodoric, 
but the tomb of Theodoric still stands, with its 
impregnable walls, its roof of a single slab of Istrian 
granite, soHd as a prison, Hke a work of Titans. 
And, ever3rwhere, with a strange and lovely placidity, 
which seems natural and at home only in Ravenna, 
there are the sarcophagi of stone and marble, in 
churches and museums, around the tomb of Dante, 
and, once only, though empty, in the mausoleum 
which was built to cover it; the vast and rocky 



RAVENNA 179 

sarcophagus of Galla Placidia. They are a part of 
the place, beautiful and formidable and peaceful 
remembrances of death. Death here becomes as 
beautiful and durable a thing as any other form of 
what is elsewhere fleeting in human things. There 
is something terrifying in the eternity of form, colour, 
substance; in Ravenna nothing is lost, everything 
lasts on, and may sometimes be thought to wish, and 
be unable, to fade out, or even to grow old visibly. 



Ill 



Lean and ascetic Ravenna has a certain ex- 
quisite rigidity in its charm, like that of a crucifix, 
like that of the strange, severe, and sumptuous 
crucifix of engraved silver discs in the Cathedral. 
The streets are long and straight, with sharp angles, 
rarely a curve: you can look half way across the 
city, and see the light through any one of its great 
gateways. And the houses are almost all flat ; they 
are large, severe, with iron bars over the lower 
windows ; they have rarely a balcony or any exterior 
decoration. The houses of the Polentas or of the 
Traversari are only distinguished from the later 
buildings by a finer severity, by a few rigid cornices 
or lintels, and by a more heavily resistant way of 
leaning back from a base solidly planted in the earth. 
The very ruins, the ruins of the palace of Theodoric, 
for instance, form level lines with the street, and 
bring no disturbing picturesqueness into the pattern. 



i8o RAVENNA 

And, in all this, there is a form of charm as inherent 
as in the severe art of mosaic. In Ravenna mosaic 
obtains a quality hardly known elsewhere, a quality 
of softness, almost a diaphanous quality. The 
colours of mosaic in Venice are the colours of Venetian 
water, as it is stained by clouds and by the hard 
bright reflections of things : Venetian mosaic is water 
turned to stone. But in Ravenna its colours are 
those of the sky above them. I have seen, at sunset, 
a sky in which I could distinguish the exact shades 
of colour, certain purples and reds and bluish yellows, 
which I had seen in the mosaics of S. Vitale, in the 
birds and beasts and fruits in the central roof of the 
choir there. I have seen, at sunset, the subtlest 
green of S. Apollinare in Classe, the malachite and 
lapis lazuli of the Baptistery of the Orthodox, alive 
and momentary in the sky above Ravenna. 

Ravenna is a city clothed in hard substances: 
marble, and the metallic brightness of mosaic. 
And these hard substances have become ductile and 
luminous, a garment of Oriental stuffs and jewels, 
coloured in infinite gradations. Its splendour is se- 
pulchral, and to walk in it is to walk in a buried 
city, where the earth has been heaped for centuries 
over rich treasures, never quite lost, nor ever wholly 
recovered. To enter S. Vitale is like entering an 
excavation, and one has almost the sensation that 
these columns of white marble, with their exquisite 
and severe capitals, so precise and delicate, these 
veined marbles which paint the walls, these domes 



RAVENNA i8i 

and arches over which fields and skies of mosaic 
flame and blossom, are now being dug up out of the 
earth. Everywhere there is a covering of rough 
red brick, a mere shell, over these temples, which 
are still, after the devastations of fourteen hundred 
years, the most royal palaces built for God and the 
saints. 

Sigismondo Malatesta stripped the marble from 
the walls of S. Apollinare in Classe, but the twenty- 
four columns of greyish- white marble, resting on 
their square, carved, white marble bases, still stand 
in their place, twelve on either side, and lead up to 
the broad circular steps of the tribuna, where, in 
the dome, colour begins. If the mosaics of the nave 
of S. Apollinare Nuovo could but be transferred to 
the walls of the nave of S. Apollinare in Classe, we 
should have, under one roof, an all but perfect sixth- 
century basilica, clothed in colours as flaming and 
imperishable as jewels. In the choir of S. Vitale 
there is a column of green marble veined with more 
colours than I have ever seen in marble: agate, 
porphyry, malachite, and I know not how many other 
precious substances. Looked at against the light it 
is like a great mottled green snake, dully alive, and 
standing rigid. Overhead, in the dome, there is a 
sky which is like the neck of a peacock, flowered 
over with patterns of leaves and beasts and birds, 
in the fixed, fiery, and gentle illumination of mosaic. 

It is always the green of grass and the blue of the 
sky that are burnt into these coloured spaces like 



I82 



RAVENNA 



flames. And, as one might remember certain flowers 
among the flowers of a great garden, or certain jewels 
from a cabinet of jewels, I remember chiefly, and 
with most of separate pleasure, the gold stars on the 
blue nocturnal sky of the dome of the mausoleum of 
Galla Placidia; the birds of all species and all colours, 
the ducks and hens, among red disks, trefoHated 
outwards in white, which make the inner ceiling of 
the Cappella di S. Pier Crisologo; the lapis lazuli 
which makes a sky in the dome of the Baptistery, 
against which the twelve Apostles walk in gold and 
white robes, with jewelled crowns in their hands, and 
the green grass, on which a shadow turns and darkens 
with their feet, as the circle goes round with the sun ; 
the smooth green carpet of grass in the heavenly 
meadow which curtains the whole dome of S. Apol- 
Hnare in Classe like a sky; the peacocks at the four 
corners of the roof of the tribuna of S. Vitale, and 
the globes of burning blue under the feet of the four 
angels who point to the central Lamb; and, in S. 
Apollinare Nuovo, the Eastern shawls and jewels 
and the points of the red slippers of the women who 
carry crowns to the Virgin, and the white and gold 
curtains looped back from the windows of the royal 
palace of Ravenna. 

IV 

But, in Ravenna, there is another charm besides 
this visible one. It is to be loved for its sternness, 



RAVENNA 183 

the barriers to its beauty, what is tragic and un- 
yielding in it, its still and silent attitude of fixed 
meditation and remembrance, its stoniness, its mists 
and winter colour, its reticent, unwilling, and mysteri- 
ous response to a mood of the sky or of the hour. 
It broods among memories, forgetting nothing. The 
heroic and unhappy Queen Galla Placidia has still 
her place there, outside her mausoleum, empty now 
of all but the beauty which she created about her, 
fifteen centuries ago. The peasants, as they pass 
the rocky tomb standing in the midst of fields, with 
its two bushes of pampas-grass, like two lamps 
burning with white flame, before it, speak of Theo- 
doric the Goth, as of a king against whom Garibaldi 
might have led them. One still sees, in the mosaic 
of the choir of S. Vitale, the insatiable eyes of the 
Empress Theodora, as she stands, tall and royally 
draped and crowned with pearls, offering a cup of 
gold to the throned Christ. In the church of S. 
Maria in Porto Fuori, which rises with its great 
square tower out of a farmyard in a field, one still 
sees, among the half -ruined frescoes with their colours 
of pale rose, the calm and eager face of Francesca da 
Rimini: the bright gold hair wreathed with green 
leaves, the long neck, the long sensitive hands, the 
long straight line of nose and forehead, and the 
wide-open eye, looking down from an open window, 
as if for the first sight of Paolo. The cottage 
woman who opened the church door for me spoke 
with an easy, smiling, and respectful familiarity of 



i84 RAVENNA 

Francesca and of Peter the Sinner, the Blessed 
Pietro degH Onesti who built the church in 1096. 
A peasant whom I met in the Pineta said to me: 
"Have you seen Dante's Walk, under the trees 
by the canal? He used to walk there in the even- 
ings, studying." He said it as if his grandfather 
had met Dante walking there. 

Ravenna is full of Dante. His tomb, inscribed 
" Dantis Poetae Sepulchrum," 
is railed in with the eleven early Christian sar- 
cophagi of the "Sepolcreto di Braccioforte," and 
with certain tablets to Mazzini hung with wreaths 
of dry leaves. It is in the earliest of these sar- 
cophagi that d'Annunzio has planted a rose-tree in 
the first act of '* Francesca da Rimini," where Fran- 
cesca walks round it in the court of her father's 
house, and touches the carvings on the four sides, 
and says, as she touches each in order: 

" The Redeemer treads 

Under his feet the lion and the snake; 

Mary saluted Elizabeth ; 

Our Lady, and the angel bids * All hail ! ' 

The stags are drinking at the running brook." 

By the side of the tomb is the house, its windows 
bricked up, but the tall brown wall still solid, where, 
as the tablet tells you, Dante was the guest of Guido 
da Polenta: ''Quest a casa fu un tempo dei 
Polentani, che ebbero la gloria di accogliere ospital- 
mente Dante Alighieri." On an old red wall over- 
looking the public gardens near the station there 



RAVENNA 185 

is another tablet: "Beatrice, figliuola di Dante Al- 
ighieri, in questo cenobio di Santo Stefano degli 
Olivi si vot5 a Dio, indegnata delle nequizie del 
mondo, visto da una rea fazione di cittadini dan- 
nato il padre a perpetuo esilio e mendico ire in 
cerca dell'altrui pane" (Beatrice, daughter of 
Dante Alighieri, in this convent of Santo Stefano 
degli Olivi, devoted herself to God, wroth with the 
world's wickedness, having seen her father, through 
the evil dissension of citizens, condemned to per- 
petual exile, and to become a beggar for the bread 
of strangers). 

After Dante, Byron is still the great presence in 
Ravenna. The hotel w^hich bears his name was 
the palace of the Guiccioli, and Byron lived there, 
as cavalier servente of the Countess, from June, 181 9, 
to October, 182 1. Across the square, now the 
Piazza Byron, is the Cafe Byron, and an inscription 
over the door tells us that Byron, when he first came 
to Ravenna, chose to live in this house because it 
was near the tomb of Dante. The tablet calls him 
''splendore del secolo decimonono." In the street 
opposite there is a little curiosity-shop, and one 
afternoon, as I was looking vainly around the 
shelves, the shopkeeper put on an air of mystery, 
and called me into a corner, while he unlocked a 
drawer and took out a piece of yellowing paper. It 
was a draft of £500 made out to Byron's credit in 
182 1, and signed by him, in his unmistakable hand- 
writing, on the stamped paper of the period. The 



i86 RAVENNA 

old man told me with pride that his mother had 
been educated in the same convent with Byron*s 
daughter, the Convent of S. Francesco, across the 
way; they had been great friends, he said. 



In the country about Ravenna there is a luxurious 
harshness. The bank of wall on which you may 
walk round the city looks outwards over wide, flat, 
marshy plains, and, as far as you can see, the plains 
broaden, set with thin trees, which I saw desolately 
shedding their last leaves, on a day late in Novem- 
ber. There was a faint mist ; the air was damp and 
cold. Straight roads, going between narrow alleys 
of these thin and almost leafless trees, stretched 
across the plain with a dusty monotony. Dry 
stalks rattled in the fields, beyond hedges of faded 
green and yellow bushes; field after field lay in long 
narrow strips, side by side, colour by colour, dull 
greens and browns, spotted by sudden gleams of 
autumn colouring; with here and there a garden of 
white chrysanthemums, a garden of vegetables 
surrounded by trellised vines, or a plot of weedy 
grass, with fruit trees around it. White bullocks 
passed on the roads, dragging primitive carts of 
singular shape, painted all over with pictures in 
bright colours. Here and there women worked with 
bare feet in the fields ; old men scraped together the 
fallen leaves out of the ditches ; small black donkeys 



RAVEiNNA 187 

waited for their little carts to be filled. In the air, the 
feeling of the earth ; in all these gestures, in the colour 
of the day, in the attitude of Ravenna, heaped 
there so Hke a funeral monument, I felt the winter. 
Between Ravenna and the sea the land is almost 
half water. Marshes lie on each side of the narrow 
path by the canal, and the canal turns aside into 
many creeks and channels, with rushy mud banks 
around them, and, beyond, pools of water with 
brown reedy grass growing up out of it. The land 
is fiat to the horizon, dull brown or green where 
there is not the glitter of water, bright white, or 
blue like lapis lazuli. In the distance thin lines 
of stone-pines stand up against the sky; here and 
there, not far from the road, the pines cluster; on 
the left, beyond the canal and the moorland, there 
is the dense wall of the Pineta, green-black above, 
with shadowy tints of lavender about the stems. 
Along the canal men are fishing with strange nets 
hoisted on cranes, like vast insects with endless 
tentacles, two reaching forwards and two backwards, 
webbed with one immense net of delicate meshes : it 
dips with a slow and stealthy motion into the water, 
and, as it is hoisted again, you see the fish leaping 
in its midst. Some of these fantastic, almost living 
creatures hang over the sea itself, from the planks 
and heaped stones which go out in a long double 
line into the water, to form a narrow harbour ; fishing- 
boats with orange and ochre sails lie along both 
sides of it; and beyond, the coast is flat, dreary, 



i88 RAVENNA 

unvaried, a line of dark sand and short brown weedy 
grass along the edge of the grey sea. 

Outside Ravenna, by whatever gate one leaves 
it, there is, for a certain space around the walls, a 
monotonous dreariness, out of which one gradually 
distinguishes, first, the thin hne of white trees, then 
the vines festooned from tree to tree around the 
fields, the white oxen ploughing the black earth, 
yoked two by two in eights; then, ruddy or orange 
sails seen across the fields from the direction of the 
harbour; and, in the midst of the plain, the tower, 
like a lighthouse tower, of the church of S. Maria in 
Porto Fuori, and the bare bulk and tall round cam- 
panile of S. ApoUinare in Classe, as if forgotten by 
the side of a road that no longer leads anywhere. 
Soon after S. ApoUinare in Classe, woods begin. 
There are long and white trails of bright and painted 
bushes, with young pine-trees in their midst, and 
tangles of grass, and taller trees with grey stems and 
delicate branches. One treads upon brown leaves 
between hedges of yellowing green, which open, now 
and again, upon a pool or marsh, in which the wa- 
ter glitters between leaves and stems. It is long 
before the stone-pines begin, and they begin one by 
one, each spreading its sunshade of green lace over 
its own circle of grass. They stand in lines and 
thin clusters beside the canal, rising almost out of 
the bright water; and their mass thickens and 
darkens towards the sea, making that "reedy trem- 
bling" under a gentle wind which Dante speaks of. 



RAVENNA 189 

As I came to the edge of the wood, and saw sails 
at the end of a space of brown and marshy ground, 
and heard the sea, a woman inside the one cottage 
that stood there began to sing to herself. It was 
a wild and melancholy dirge, and seemed to put the 
feeling of the place and the hour into music. 

Winter, 1903. 



PISA 



191 



PISA 

I 

At the extreme edge of Pisa, in a corner of its 
battlemented walls, there is a meadow, wdth daisies 
among the bright green grass; a dusty road goes 
along its whole length, leading from the tow^n into 
the fiat country outside the gate; and on the other 
side of the meadow is the w^hite low wall of the Campo 
Santo. Between, in the midst of the grass, there 
are two miraculous buildings in white marble, which 
the weather and the ages have turned to the yellow 
of old ivory, faintly banded with black: the Bap- 
tistery and the Cathedral. Beyond the Cathedral, 
leaning fourteen feet out of the perpendicular, away 
from it, a white miraculous toy, the Campanile; 
and beyond, over the house-tops, the placid outlines 
of the hills. From the top of the Campanile you 
can see the whole brown city, ruddy with roofs, en- 
closed by its battlemented walls, nested in the smooth 
green hollow between the mountains and the sea; 
the white roads on the plain, the shining curve of 
the Arno, and then, beyond a line of brown woods, 

193 



194 PISA 

the faint blue streak of the sea, and what seems like 
a great hill coming up sheer out of it, the island of 
La Gorgona. Landwards, all round, there is a circle 
of hills, which on one side close in almost upon the 
town, and you catch the sparkle of the hills of 
Carrara. 

And between this unparalleled corner and the 
eager modern life of the busy town there seems, at 
first, no kinship. The people of Pisa are wild and 
untamed, with something gipsy and a little savage 
in their aspect. Children run barefoot, or in wooden 
clogs without heels, and at night there are cries 
and clatterings in the streets, asleep so early, which 
lie aside from the busy main thoroughfares. The 
faces of girls and women, with their straight eye- 
brows and eyes set high under them, are often very 
handsome, at times lovely; and they have a wild 
charm, a kind of engaging impudence. The men are 
rough, hot-tempered, loud-tongued ; the quality of 
the peasant as if sharpened, set on edge, soured 
perhaps, by town life. On the other side of a pine- 
wood there is Leghorn, where there are sailors, Jews, 
the sea, one of the ways into the world. 

And Pisa itself, as one roams in it, under the ar- 
cades of the Borgo, or coming out of narrow streets 
into broad vacant squares, or following the delicate 
windings of the river, has something fragile in its 
aspect, a quiet enveloping subtlety, which is not in 
keeping either with that modern life or with what 
is solid and unworn in the age of its vast white monu- 
ments of marble. What is it that seems to be con- 



PISA 195 

cealed here, an alluring and quite innocent mystery 
in things, unconscious of itself, and made out of 
many contraries? After Ravenna, where the whole 
place is subdued into a kind of sepulchral melan- 
choly, and seems to brood feverishly over its tombs, 
Pisa, which is also the guardian of so much ancient 
death, seems to be irrelevantly awake and alive. 
It keeps this holy earth and these white glories as 
a possession, not subdued to their mood, with a life 
wholly apart from them. 

And so it is always with the same sensation of 
surprise that one turns aside from the river, passes 
through vague streets in which the sense of life 
and movement dies gradually away, and comes out 
suddenly upon that green meadow folded into the 
angle of the town wall, with its three white marvels, 
the Baptistery, the Cathedral, and the Campanile, 
rising into the sky at different heights, but with the 
same dainty massiveness, and behind them the 
long white outer wall of the Campo Santo, as if it 
hid something formidable and mysterious. I do 
not know any corner of the actual world which seems 
so improbable, when one is actually there. A 
street's length away peasants shout angrily on their 
way from the railway-station to the market-place; 
the river is flowing on continually from the hills 
beyond Florence to the sea; and that trivial, eager 
life and that soft continual passing away are equally 
remote, as one lingers, among these relics that seem 
the work of magic, and to have been kept white and 
untouched by some magical intervention. 



196 PISA 

II 

Nothing, in this group of marvels on the grass, 
has a separate beauty quite equal to its surprising 
beauty as a whole. It is composed on a vast scale, 
and to give the effect of daintiness; and impresses 
one first as some kind of giant's play-work in ivory. 
The aspect of the Campanile, an immense, inexplica- 
ble tube, with its pillars and rounded arches as if 
carved in a pattern round and round something that 
one could take up in one's hand, is fantastic by day, 
for its strangeness, its whiteness, its mocking bias; 
but by night it becomes ominous, overpowering, 
and seems to lift itself into the darkness like a solid 
column of grey smoke, which bends over to precipi- 
tate some vague ruin. On the other side of the 
meadow the Baptistery has been laid down on the 
grass like a jewelled casket, the largest and most 
splendid casket in the world. It shelters jewels, 
the carved pulpit of Niccola Pisano, and, far lovelier, 
the baptismal font, with its lace-work in black, 
white, and yellow marble, circle within circle and 
square within square, on each of its eight sides. The 
most part of the Baptistery dates from the beginning 
of the twelfth century, and, in spite of some later 
additions, adding needless decoration, it has a sober 
grandeur, a large and elaborate simplicity, which 
gives one the complete satisfaction of a thing wholly 
organic, a natural growth. The Cathedral is fault- 
lessly constructed, and has been a pattern to most 



PISA 197 

other work in the Tuscan Romanesque manner, yet, 
seen from the ground, and from in front, it is diffi- 
cult to feel the same sense of satisfaction. Inside, 
''no place of equal splendour," says one who knows 
more of churches and their qualities than most men, 
"is quite so devout." The structure, of white 
marble alternating with black marble, is itself a de- 
coration of an exquisitely severe richness. Outside, 
especially about the choir and transepts, the same 
structure (so plain, undecorated, as it seems after 
the stone forests of French Gothic) is no less delicate 
in its pale colours. But in the fagade, so famous and 
in truth so original, with its ascending and diminish- 
ing rows of slender columns, there is, in the design 
an admirable symmetry, yet a symmetry whose 
elegance is hardly thrilling. The lower part, in the 
patterns around the doorways, and in the frieze of 
beasts which runs across above the first rows of 
pillars, is carved finely, and the colours inlaid in the 
stone are used carefully, in subordination to the 
structural work in carving; but, higher up, inlaid 
patterns are substituted, with a somewhat crowded, 
merely prettifying effect, for the firmer and finer 
outlines of carved stone. I like best to look down 
on the Cathedral from the top of the Campanile, for 
from that point it is wholly beautiful, and one sees 
its characteristically Pisan design, like the painted 
crucifixes in the Museum, the choir and transepts 
making the curved top and side-pieces, and the 
dome the raised head-piece or halo. Seen from that 



198 PISA 

height it seems to be laid out on the grass carpet 
like an immense crucifix of tarnished silver or old 
ivory. 

By the side of the Cathedral, inside a low white 
wall, the painted cloisters of the Campo vSanto, with 
their precious marbles, surround a long and narrow 
space of green grass, open to the sky. The Campo 
Santo is the "Memento Mori" of the Middle Ages 
to Italy. The paintings on the walls of these cloisters 
can be compared only with the German " Dances 
of Death," and the like, and there is in the contrast 
all the difference of the two races. The imagina- 
tion of Orgagna, or of the Pisans who painted the 
*' Triumph of Death," the ** Last Judgment," and the 
**Hell" is less naturally fantastic than the German 
imagination; it is logical, faithful to a conception, 
and desires only to be very real in turning into visible 
shape what it has come to believe of invisible things 
and of things to come. The remembrances of 
death are brought in with crude physical horror, as 
the tortures of the mediasval hell are also, with a 
pitiless straightforwardness: the knight who stops 
his nose over an open grave, the horse that neighs 
and snuffs at the worms there. The saved folk in 
heaven are folk out of the painter's own city, making 
music and caressing their lapdogs under the trees 
in a Pisan meadow in summer. It is very real old 
men and beggars and halt and maimed folk who 
hold out their hands in vain supplication, as the 
sc3rthed angel passes over them, on other business, 



PISA 199 

in the air. And to the painter there is a tragedy 
not less Hteral and actual in the flight of angels and 
devils over the little male and female souls that 
fly upwards out of the open mouths of sleepers. 
**Hell is murky," and he sees it in just such circles 
of bodily agony, with these prongs and snakes and 
flames, and devils no less scaled, and claw^ed, and 
elaborated for all the parodies of hate. These pic- 
tures on the walls are pictures secondly, and first of 
all teaching, a warning to those about to die. It is 
their intention, not their pattern, that makes them 
pictures ; it is by their literal rendering of the beliefs 
of their time, it is by their sheer force as a homily in 
paint, that they appeal to us now, in these cloisters 
of this chapel of death, with a poignancy which is 
still contemporary. 



Ill 



Pisan art, as one sees it in the Museum, begins 
with miniatures, strange bright stains on parch- 
ment, of the eleventh century. Two centuries later 
come the paintings on wood and those singular 
crucifixes with their gilt halos raised from the 
wood of the cross, throwing the head forward. The 
Christs are all Jews, and Mary is a Jewess, with a 
simplicity untroubled by the irrationalities of tradi- 
tion. The finest crucifix is one attributed to Giunta 
Pisano, splendid in design and colour, with its 
sombre richness, its elaborate decoration, its rim of 



200 PISA 

heavy gold nails ; the whole horror made passionate 
and austere, with a tragic beauty in the lean, con- 
torted figure, the agonised attendant faces. 

And these crucifixes are seen in room after room, 
together with panels with gold backgrounds, set in 
decorative frames; all minutely painted in crude ■ 
bright colours, with an earnest attempt to render 
the reality of earthly things and to invent some 
ideal beauty for spiritual things. There are works 
by artists of Pisa, Siena, and Florence; and one 
passes from picture to picture a little dazed and dis- 
concerted by their conventions which no longer 
mean anything, forgotten formulas, discovering a 
beauty of colour here, a naivete of design there, but 
seeing them for the most part as one reads verse in 
a language only partially known. There are frag- 
ments of marble among the pictures, an exquisite 
rose-window from the church of the Spina, a broken 
but still lovely and terrible monster crouched and 
leaning over a wall, wooden statues out of churches, 
with jointed hands and arms, and with a quaint 
conscious charm in their suggestion of slim bodies. 
Nothing among the pictures touched me so closely 
as a series of small panels from the high altar of 
Santa Caterina, by Simone Martini. In their dainty 
architectural gilt frames, against their backgrounds 
of gold, they have a calm, severely rich beauty of 
design and colour. A lovely Magdalen holds a chased 
casket, and there is subtlety in the long oval of the 
sleepy, faint, and morbid face with its ruddy hair 



PISA 20I 

and jewelled band across the forehead. All these 
saints have plaintive, formal,, expressive faces, there 
is a delicacy in their eyelids and long fingers, and 
they make sensitive gestures. 



IV 



Poets have loved Pisa, and are remembered there. 
It was its peace, says Mrs. Shelley, that suited 
Shelley; ''our roots," he says himself, "never struck 
so deep as at Pisa." Byron, Shelley, and Leopardi 
all lived and wrote in Pisa, and there are marble 
tablets recording them on the houses in which they 
lived. Leopardi's house was in the Via Fagiuoli; 
Byron's and Shelley's almost opposite one another, 
on each side of the river. The Palazzo Lanfranchi, 
now Palazzo Torcanelli, is a simple, massive house 
of plain brown stone, the doors and windows out- 
lined in white stone; it stands on the sunny side of 
the river, not far from the Ponte di Mezzo. The 
inscription says: "Giorgio Gordon Noel Byron qui 
dimor5 dall' autunno del 182 1 all' estate del 1822 
e scrisse sei canti del' 'Don Giovanni.'" Shelley's 
house is on the Lung' Arno Galileo, opposite a little 
eastward, part of a big building with yellow plastered 
walls and windows; and the inscription says: " Percy 
Bysshe Shelley trascorse in queste mura gli ultimi 
mesi del 182 1, I'inverno del 1822, qui tradusse in 
versi immortali gli affetti e le imagine che Pisa gli 
inspirb, e compose I'elegia in morte di John Keats, 



202 PISA 

'Adonais.'" Shelley has captured much of the 
soul of Pisa in two lovely poems, "Evening: Ponte 
a Mare," where the "slow soft toads out of damp 
corners creep," and the lines on "The Tower of 
Famine," which render the whole aspect and atmos- 
phere of the fourteenth-century Arsenal tower, heavy 
and ominous, which he took to be Ugolino's. Ugo- 
lino's tower was pulled down long ago, and an in- 
scription on the house which replaced it, at the 
corner of the Piazza dei Cavalieri, tells you where 
it stood. 

In Pisa the Middle Ages are felt everywhere, but 
for the most part as an echo, an odour, rather than 
in any actual stone, literally surviving. Many of 
the streets keep their old quaint names unspoilt; 
as the Via delle Belle Torri, with its two side-streets, 
the Via TAmore, and the Via del Cuore. The arcades 
of the Borgo remind one of Padua, and as one walks 
under them there are glimpses, here and there, of 
pillared church-fronts, or of the carving on old houses. 
There is the eleventh-century church of S. Pierino, 
with its steps leading up from the street, its heavy 
pillars, and fine floor of mosaic; S. Michele in Borgo, 
with its facade in three tiers, of pillars and tre- 
foliated arches, severer in design than the facade 
of the Cathedral; there is the admirable S. Paolo a 
Ripa d'Arno; and there is the thirteenth-century 
Santa Maria della Spina, the sailor's church, set 
down like a white and black trinket, on the banks of 
the Arno. Begging brothers of the Misericordia pass 



PISA 203 

you in the streets, with their black livery, black 
hoods, and vast black hats slung upon their backs. 
Girls and women stand chattering about the many 
fountains, drawing water, and carrying it in small 
copper cans, all of one pattern, shaped delicately 
like ancient vases. But, for the most part, that 
sense of peace, that placid melancholy, which comes 
to seem the natural atmosphere of Pisa, harmonising 
whatever is new, active, and stirring in it with all 
that remains, not only in its one enchanting comer, 
of past ages, is a kind of intangible charm, made up 
of many elements and softly transfiguring them: 
the languid evenings when the lights begin to come 
out along the river, the lovely curve of its course 
between red-roofed and green-shuttered houses, the 
boats that float down helped by oars and sail, the 
sight of misty hills beyond the water; sunsets that 
burn the sky to soft fire above the roofs; and the 
wind that comes up the river every night from the 
sea, tempered to softness as it drifts through Pisa. 



A large part of the beauty of Pisa comes to it 
from the Arno, which winds through it from end to 
end, and can be followed into the leafy country, by a 
grassy path which goes beside it, always within 
sight of the hills, which, on a misty evening in 
March, are like banks of solid smoke. Under a 
grey sky, in the faint mist which veils the outlines 



204 PISA 

of the hills, Spring budding overhead in the trees 
and starring their brown branches with green, among 
which tiny bats fly restlessly, the night comes on 
gently, with a peaceful and slightly mournful charm. 
Coming back, I saw the long curved line of the Lung' 
Arno, the brown and yellow and green of the houses 
under a low-hanging thunder-cloud about to burst; 
a rich, deep, complex effect of colour, sombre and 
with a dull sort of intensity, as if some fierce heat 
smouldered there. After a rain-storm in the hills 
the river awakens violently, and rushes downwards, 
swollen, yellow, and curdled, creased and wried into 
wrinkles and cross-eddies. At night, looking down 
on it from a high window, the water is oily black, 
streaked with white, and the reflections of the gas 
lamps along the quays plunge downwards like long 
stakes of gold, planted in the river. Where the 
light strikes it one can see the tide flowing swiftly; 
but for the most part it is a black pit of water, divid- 
ing the town. 

If you follow the river to the sea you will come to 
one of the loveliest places in Italy, Bocca dArno, 
where the Arno freshens into little waves as it meets 
the sea-waves and mingles with them. On one side 
of the river the sand begins, and beyond the grass 
there are pine-trees, green to blackness as they 
thicken and cut off the sky. On the other side of 
the river there is a flat green marsh, ending upon a 
dark line of trees. Above, there are jagged peaks 
against the sky, hills white with snow where they 



PISA 205 

rise into the white rain-clouds. Towards Pisa the 
hills darken, softening into gentler curves. And it 
seems as if nothing that is supremely beautiful in 
nature is not here. Here, at this lovely meeting- 
place, are hills, woods, valleys, a river, and the sea. 
Spring, 1904. 



SIENA 



207 



SIENA 



Inflexible Siena, St. Catherine's, is a fierce 
eyrie for visions, yet, planted so firmly on its rock, 
almost every house still at need a fortress, is as if 
fortified permanently against enemies. The coun- 
try comes right up to its gates, and is beaten back 
there; the ancient walls are like a rampart, and in- 
side them all the houses climb upward, crowding 
and tightening about the cathedral, until their 
roofs and walls almost merge into its structure. 
They climb to it and cling like peasants about a 
queen, dressed in their homely brown and soiled 
white and with all the patches of poverty; and the 
queen stands royally attired, in the supreme dis- 
tinction of black and white. This concentration of 
the city upon itself, these close streets which twist 
around one another, cross and recross, and rise so 
high in order that they may not need to extend 
widely, this complete detachment from everything 
outside the walls which mark the city's limit, must 
certainly have helped the growth of that instinct 
from which it sprang, the instinct of proud aloofness. 
Siena is like a little China, and its city-walls mark 

209 
14 



2IO SIENA 

the bounds of what it chooses to keep from strangers. 
The image of the Middle Ages still persists in its 
streets, and the character of its people remains un- 
changed. Customs never die in Siena, and change 
has no temptation for the Sienese. White oxen 
still walk in the streets, drowsing in couples, their 
wide horns almost touching the walls on either side ; 
and they drag wicker carts shaped like Roman 
chariots. 

The modern spirit has spoiled Rome, and is daily- 
destroying there. It is more slowly, but not less 
certainly, destroying Venice, with a literal, calcu- 
lated destruction. Florence has let in the English, 
who board there, and a new spirit, not destructive, 
reverent of past things but superficial with new 
civilisation, has mingled the Renaissance with the 
commonplace of the modern world. But Siena is 
content to remain itself, neither ambitious nor de- 
jected, busying itself with its old industries (the 
smell of the tanneries, as in the days of St. Catherine, 
never out of its streets), keeping its beautiful old 
things quietly, not trying to make new things like 
them; content with the old limits, and with all old 
things as they were. 

And the splendour and dignity of its past still 
live nobly in all the walls of Siena. Its history is 
written there in stone, and with a lasting beauty, 
in the walls of all its palaces. Palaces line the 
streets, Gothic and Renaissance, all fiat, severe, 
built with grey stone cut into square blocks, with 



SIENA 211 

here and there a reminiscence of the less simple and 
admirable Florentine manner of building with partly- 
unhewn blocks. The palaces join walls with private 
houses, and ask for no more space in these equalising 
streets, to which they add force and beauty. They 
accommodate themselves to the street, and turn 
with it, in a kind of democracy of pride. Towers, 
structures like prisons, gloomy remnants, which 
stand at street-corners or between shop and shop, 
come into the pattern naturally, without incongruity. 
All Siena is of one piece, and at night sleeps together 
with the same tranquil sleep. 

There is in the streets at night a curious sense of 
quiet, not the quiet of suspense or desolation, but 
rather of people who prefer to stay indoors, in their 
own homes, with walls and windows between them 
and other people, in a quite friendly aloofness. 
The streets do not call to them, as they call to people 
in the South; they are corridors to walk through, not 
alleys to linger in ; and the Sienese are not lingerers. 
Even by day few people stand idle in the streets; 
the church-square, on its height, is no meeting-place. 
Siena works quietly by day, and at night sleeps 
quietly. And, in the deserted streets, dimly lighted 
by gas lamps at rare intervals, you seem to walk 
through some mysterious excavation, with precipi- 
tous descents on every side of you, going down, you 
know not whither, into some lower part of the 
earth or of the night. 



212 SIENA 

II 

The streets in Siena are high and narrow, and 
they plunge upwards and downwards, under dark 
arches, as if tunnelled out of solid rock, with walls 
built straight, from pavement to roof, every window 
flat to the wall, without ledge or cornice or balcony. 
The streets are built to let in the wind and to keep 
out the sun, and around all the squares, vast and 
empty, walls are built against the sky, and square 
thin towers climb straight to the stars, each to a 
separate star in the stretched and many-lighted 
canopy. The streets are set at all angles; the walls 
seem to meet overhead, they plunge into invisible 
depths. There are streets which go down hill so 
rapidly that one is obliged to lean back on every 
step, and then straight up hill again at almost an 
acute angle; rarely a street which goes far on one 
level, and never a street which goes far in one direc- 
tion without turning. One looks down from the 
street where one is walking, upon another which 
passes under it or strikes out at right angles at the 
bottom of a long flight of steps. One peers through 
an archway on a piazza of which one sees no more 
than the pavement and the foundation of the houses, 
or looks upward through an archway above a flight 
of steps, and sees only the tops of the houses. 

In the heart of Siena there is a square, the Piazza 
Vittorio Emanuele, which is shaped like the inside 
of a shell, and curves upwards from the Palazzo 



SIENA 213 

Communale, with its high tower, la Mangia, which 
rises into the sky, red and white, with only less than 
the supreme elegance of the dragon's neck of Flor- 
ence, the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio. The square 
is surrounded by tall irregular houses, built of red 
brick, with green wooden shutters; narrow lanes 
lead out of it upward and downward, and as you 
look through an archway you see feet walking above 
your head, and heads moving below your feet. The 
middle of the square is paved with red brick, and 
one walks on it as on Alps ; all around are short white 
stone pillars, set at intervals, and beyond there is a 
strip of grey stone pavement, round which the horses 
race every year in the sport of the Palio, which 
has survived in Siena since the Middle Ages. 

Religion too, in Siena, is a part of tradition, like 
the Palio, and the whole population can be seen going 
all one way, like a Spanish city on the day of a bull- 
fight, when the sermon is to end the "forty hours'* 
at S. Domenico. In that church of St. Catherine, 
where Sodoma has painted her famous agony, one 
sees a great crowd, of townsfolk and peasants, as- 
sembling gravely, and standing patiently to listen 
to the sermon, which is spoken monotonously from 
the pulpit, all on one note, with pauses for rest 
between each division. It is an old usage, and the 
people follow it with a natural obedience. And in 
the same way, with simplicity, not with fervour they 
observe their feast-days. I was in Siena on the day 
of Saint Joseph, and as I went towards the little 



214 SIENA 

mean church of S. Giuseppe, in its high corner, a 
kind of fair seemed to be going on. On both sides 
of the two steep streets, S. Giovanni Dupre and S. 
Agata, Httle wooden toys, that ran on wheels made 
of fir-cones, were being sold, and the people went 
up and down the two streets, dressed in their best 
clothes, the flapping Leghorn hats garlanded with 
flowers nodding grotesquely, as with an affectation 
of youth, on aged heads. Very soon one distin- 
guished that these people were on their way to the 
church where mass was being said, and they poured 
in through the middle door and out through the 
two side-doors, and every one dropped a coin into 
the money-box on the table inside the door, and 
received in exchange a leaflet with an image of St. 
Joseph, and kissed it with pious gravity. It is only 
on festa days that Siena seems completely to waken, 
and it is only a few streets that are alive at any one 
time. 

What is still most living in Siena is the memory 
of St. Catherine. Every child in the street offers 
to take you to see her house, which stands half way 
down the hill leading to the valley of the tanners 
and dyers, and to Fontebranda, the fountain which 
Dante remembered in hell. St. Catherine's head, 
a ghastly relic (of which I saw only the copy in her 
house, beautiful in the mortal pallor of the wax) , is 
still kept in a shrine in S. Domenico under the altar 
of the chapel which Sodoma painted in her honour. 
It is for the sake of this relic, and because St. Gather- 



SIENA 215 

ine used to come to this church to pray tnat S. 
Domenico is still the favourite church in Siena, 
though the main part of the building has been turned 
into barracks. The vast Gothic structure, built of 
red brick, massive and imposing in its simplicity, 
is one of the landmarks of Siena. It is on the edge 
of a gulf, over against the Cathedral; and on the 
other side of the gulf, brown and white houses climb, 
roof above roof, like a cluster of rocks, grouped there 
naturally ; with, high over them, long, slender, striped 
in long and slender lines of black and white marble, 
the Cathedral, like a flower which has raised itself 
out of the gross red earth and its rocks. 



Ill 



The Cathedral is a house of light, and all its 
form and ornament are meant for the sun. Only the 
facade is in part disappointing, where, in the upper 
half, the modern mosaics bring a distracting tangle 
into what would have been the splendid design of 
the lower half. Seen from S. Domenico, on its hill, 
it has a clear, almost transparent beauty, a slim 
and supple and striped elegance in line, with its 
tower, so delicately symmetrical, its small grey dome 
supported on small and dainty pillars. Inside, what 
discretion, how undisfigured, how simply and har- 
moniously decorated for divine uses! Severity 
unites with sumptuousness in this distinguished 
inner covering of black and white marble, on walls 



2i6 SIENA 

and pillars. Under the dome there are tall black 
and white pillars, bearing gilt statues; gold and 
blue (with the rarest traces of red) are the two 
colours which for the most part supplement and 
enrich this severe colouring. Around the roof, 
under the cornice of the windows, there is a fan- 
tastic series of busts of the Popes, each a mitred 
head, with its faint smile or closed eyes, in its sep- 
arate niche, with the name, Formosus, Sivicius, or 
Zosimus, painted in black below. The gold on the 
mitres and on the lappets of the copes add faint 
touches of colour, and the walls below and the roof 
above are covered with fanciful patterns, and on 
the roof gold stars are set on a background of blue 
sky. In the choir, with its lovely carved wood and 
intarsia, stands the pulpit of the Pisanos, with its 
little carved world of men and the homely life of its 
beasts. Donatello's St. John stands in one of the 
side chapels named after the saint, and the five 
small frescoes of Pinturicchio have faded to a discreet 
dimness, in which one sees, not too distinctly, lovely 
landscapes of grass and trees and hills; and there 
is a fresco of Pinturicchio over an altar. 

The Library of the Cathedral, where the sculptured 
three Graces used to stand, when Raphael saw them, 
is at first sight too dazzling, and the ten frescoes 
seem to have been painted by Pinturicchio yester- 
day. The splendour strikes harshly, and it is some 
time before we can accustom our eyes to the new 
aspect of this room, which is like a missal turned 



SIENA 217 

fresco. It is to avoid the sinking of the paint into the 
plaster, and that dulness which is in itself so attrac- 
tive in fresco-painting, that Pinturicchio uses so 
much gold, whenever it can be used, on vestments, 
ceilings, canopies, altar-frames, on the bridles of 
horses, on belts, chains, and brooches, using stucco 
to give salience to the gold. He paints in clear crude 
colours, with little shading, and he uses some aston- 
ishing reds and greens and blues, which cry out like 
trumpets from the midst of these pomps and cere- 
monies. The Raphaelesque air of these gracious 
young men and of these elegant old men would 
bring a new quality into painting at Siena, with all 
that Pinturicchio chose out of the actual world: 
these decorative yet actual crowds, these knights on 
horseback, these Popes in benediction, these white- 
cowled monks, and grave Easterns in turbans. But 
in his gold and brightness and lov^e of beautiful 
ornament he was but following in the tradition of 
the Sienese painters; he was but realising some of 
their dreams, not without even a little of the hard- 
ness which with them went with their brightness, 
though with a purely human quality, a delighted 
sense of the earth, to which the growths and orna- 
ments of the earth could give entire satisfaction. 

Nothing so bright was ever put on a wall as the 
picture of that room in which ^neas Sylvius is 
made cardinal: that ceiling of gold embossed in gold, 
that red and green of canopy and curtain, that gold 
altar-front and the gold frame of the altar-piece, 



2i8 SIENA 

with the glowing white marble of the altar-slab and 
of the floor and of the steps to the throne. It is as 
if the wall opened, and the room, not the picture 
of it, the actual room and crowd, were there. 

But what is most individual in the beauty of the 
Cathedral decoration lies underfoot. The whole 
centre of the floor is carefully covered with wood, 
and it is only in the aisles that one can see the pic- 
tures cut out in thin outline as if engraved in the 
stones, which is the art peculiar to Siena. Battles 
are fought out with lances; there are figures of the 
Sibyls, with elaborate robes; friezes of winged lions; 
with scenes and stories of a great energy of move- 
ment, as in the many-coloured "Massacre of the Inno- 
cents " by Matteo di Giovanni (his favourite subject) 
with its border of laughing children looking down 
from windows and balconies, the helpless women 
with their babies, the merciless swordsmen, woven 
into a lovely decoration of tossing arms and swords 
and babies brandished in the air. Nowhere else 
has stone so flowered into daintiness, into so delicate 
an image of life; not, as elsewhere, detached, in the 
great art of sculpture, but like pictures, like draw- 
ings (as indeed they are called : Graffiti), like scratch- 
ings on slate. The Sienese love of minute finish in 
decoration is seen not only in their early paintings, 
but in tiny patterns cut in stone over doorways, like 
engraved work, in the painting of the under part of 
their jutting roofs, and, above all, in this manner of 
engraving stones as others carved wood, choosing 



SIENA 219 

the hardest material, for its difficulty, and making 
it, by the patience of their skill, a sumptuous thing. 
It is a way of turning the hard pavement under 
one's feet into a painted carpet. 

IV 

In early Sienese art, so Byzantine in manner, one is 
struck by its elaborate finish, and by a love of rich 
ornament, of bright pure colour, which is, however, 
grave and gentle, and at first used only to paint the 
beauty of Heaven and of the angels, and then the 
earthly splendour of the Popes, and lastly the divine 
humanity of St. Catherine and S. Bernardino, the 
two people of genius whom Siena gave to the angels. 
Duccio paints the faces of his Madonnas green, in 
order to suggest a superhuman countenance in 
which there is none of the human ruddiness of flesh. 
With St. Catherine another, human pallor, comes 
into painting, and Sodoma, with his new, more ac- 
complished means, strives to paint ecstasy, and 
once, in the " Sw^oon of St. Catherine " in S. Domenico, 
renders marvellously that death in life. In Sodoma, 
Sienese painting begins to become self-conscious, 
and he leads the way to the worst and feeblest ex- 
travagances of Beccafumi and Pacchiarotto. He is 
never quite sincere, or wholly given up to the thing 
he is doing, and he lets his feelings or his rhetoric 
or his skill carry him in many directions. But, 
before he destroyed Sienese art, he left at least 



220 SIENA 

one example of how what the early painters had 
been trying to do by pious formulas, the rendering 
of superhuman ecstasies, could be done, quite lit- 
erally, by sheer painting. 

What is really most profound, personal, and ex- 
quisite in Sienese painting is to be found in Duccio, 
who in his earliest work is purely Byzantine, and in 
all his work purely mediaeval . His vast altar-piece in 
the Opera del Duomo, the " Majestas," is hieratic, for- 
mal, conventionally bright, but what warm personal 
feeling there is in even what is least individualised in 
the figures of the Madonna and Child, with their gold 
halos and the pattern of gold on their scarcely faded 
robes, the burnished blue robe of the Virgin, and the 
bright robes of the attendant saints, each with gold 
halo distinct against a background of ruddier gold. 
And what sense of drama, how many kinds of beauty, 
what delicate feeling, in the numberless little scenes 
out of the Gospel, broken up into arbitrary squares 
and sections in what was once the back of the picture. 
It is all much more realised than in many Sienese 
paintings in compartments, painted with no more 
than a child's notion of what reality ought to be. 
Yet it is still to some extent image-making. But 
between this image-making and the modern rhetoric 
of Sodoma there is an art more vital than Sodoma's, 
and not wholly aloof from the decorative reality of 
the earlier work. Matteo di Giovanni and Sodoma 
are to be seen in a single chapel in S. Agostino. The 
" Massacre of the Innocents " has a violent loveliness 



SIENA 221 

which is rarer and more penetrating than anything 
which Sodoma ever attained. The packed angry 
crowd is as it were squeezed together, every face 
individually alive; the grim swordsmen, the mocking 
Jew Herod, who sits enthroned in the very midst 
of the slaughter, the agonised women, the father 
who kneels beside his wife and stretches out his arms 
tenderly over the dead child in her lap. And the 
gestures are terrible : the sword thrust into the mouth 
of the babe, as the mother all but escapes with it, 
the gold-hilted daggers gripped hard, high in the 
air, the clutching hands, and feet trampling on the 
dead, the strange decorative rim of dead babies set 
symmetrically along the floor in the front of the 
picture, the older children who look in through pil- 
lared windows, laughing idly. And this painter 
has a like care for the beauty of dresses, worked with 
gold, and falling in lovely folds, and for the scrupu- 
lous coils of hair and falling curls, and for the gold 
ornaments over Herod's throne, and for the squares 
and circles of cosimato work in the floor stained with 
little, sufficient stains of blood. Over the altar 
Sodoma has painted an ''Adoration of the Magi," and 
it is full of all the obviousness of beauty, of lyrical 
cries of colour, from here, from there: this crowned 
youth with a face in which the Leonardo smile has 
deepened to consciousness, this kneeling king with 
his effective manly grace, the effective violence of 
the negro king standing by his side, the doll-like 
Virgin and Child, St. Joseph posed for the display 



222 SIENA 

of a muscular bare arm; and beyond, a cavalcade, 
trees, rocks, a shadowy castle on a hill, glimpses of a 
faint valley ; all made of conscious charm, of a beauty 
not organic, an applied beauty. 

Elsewhere, as in S. Bernardino, where the really 
fine Sodoma is the '' Coronation of the Virgin," there 
is more of this wildly luxurious colour and languid 
form, nudes of romantic softness, strange spots of 
feverish colour, as in the leopard-skin and purple 
girdle of St. John, and in the melting white drapery 
of the Virgin, and in the ruddy hair and beard of 
Christ. But what all this leads to is to be seen 
tragically on another wall, in Beccafumi's ''|Death of 
the Virgin," where the fever of Sodoma passes into 
delirium, and splashes in coloured waves all over 
the picture. 



There is in the ardent and concentrated beauty 
of Siena something almost artificial, as of a city 
on a hill in an old picture. From the fortifications 
one can see the whole city, the houses set tightly side 
by side, fiat, many- windowed, brown and white, 
brown-roofed, tier above tier, without visible space 
between; all clustered together, as if for safety or 
friendliness, and all leading up to the long and narrow 
Cathedral, with its dome and tower, which seems 
to draw all this irregular mass into a single harmony. 
All around it is the peace of a green world, falling into 



SIENA 223 

valleys where there is red earth and dark and pointing 
cypresses and the grey mist of olives, and rising into 
little hills where bells swing on the roofs of brown 
monasteries. As the valley dips and rises the col- 
ours darken, and, beyond the valley, hills begin pale 
green and grey, and then, against the sky lighted 
at sunset, a luminous dark blue, hke the colour of 
storm-clouds. Far off the hills seem to break like 
quiet waves, in long curved lines, against the white 
shore of sky. Seen after sunset it is as if a great 
missal, painted by Sienese artists, had been set up- 
right between earth and sky; a sky rose-coloured 
and blue and gold, the outlines of the hills drawn 
sharply against a gold background, purple-black, 
with depths of colour glowing through darkness, 
and lighted at the edges with miraculous gold. 



VERONA 



225 



VERONA 



In Verona the gutters are of marble. The ledge 
you lean upon, the flight of steps going up outside a 
house, the posts which block a street against wheels, 
the fountain in the market-place, are all made of 
white or red marble. Pillars of white or red mar- 
ble hold up the overhanging roofs of shops, and 
the shop-keepers paste their advertisements over 
the marble. Every street has its marble doorway, 
window, or balcony, shaped after a fine Renaissance 
pattern or carved with beautiful ornament. The 
Loggia in that Piazza dei Signori which holds so 
much history in its stones shows only in its harmony 
of delicate proportions and faint colors, white and 
gold and pink, a subtler and more conscious use 
of the materials which lie ready to the hand every- 
where in Verona. 

In an angle near the Ponte Navi, made by the 
Via Leoni and the Lungadige Bartolomeo Rubele, 
is an old fragment of white marble, on which two 
old and sleepy lions, wounded and worn with age, 
crouch on each side of a low pediment. To the 

227 



228 VERONA 

right and left is a short marble pillar, with a square 
cross in a circle carved upon it. Over the tops of 
the houses, opposite the river, one sees the red 
and white tower, and the choir with its pointed 
gables set between slender cone-topped pillars, of 
the Gothic church of San Fermo Maggiore. In 
this huddle of white stone which lies, uncared for, in 
the road, before the doors of two shops, the forms 
are still alive, though sunk into the uneasy sleep of 
the wounded; for the back of one of the lions is 
clean broken away, and the faces of both have gone 
dim, as if rubbed and washed out by rains and 
dust. Not far off, along the Via Leoni, is the Arch 
of the Lions, a beautiful fragment of a double 
Roman gateway, built into the wall of a house, 
with a shop-window fitted into the arch, and oil- 
lamps in the shop-window; it stands there, just 
turned aside from the tram line, a beautiful and 
indestructible thing, all its forms washed over and 
half obliterated, but still keeping the pathetic grace 
of a broken statue. 

And there are monsters everywhere, in red and 
white marble, crouching at the doors of churches 
and leaning over from the lintels, and carved in 
slabs let into the walls of houses. A very dreadful 
beast, with a face like a wheel, squats over the side 
doorway of the Cathedral, clutched, I think, from 
behind by another beast whose home is in the stone ; 
and over the pillar on the other side of the doorway 
there is another fantastic wrestle. At the main 



VERONA 229 

doorway there are two monsters of red marble, which 
still look alive and hardly older after seven centuries ; 
their fur ribbed elegantly in conventional patterns 
along their smooth sides, and on one of them a strange 
design of a wheel, as if stamped into its flesh. They 
have not the solemn humour of the two red marble 
lions outside St. Mark's at Venice, homely, com- 
panionable beasts; but are fierce and watchful. 
They have the heads of cats or tigers, and one of 
them lays its heavy claws upon two rams' heads, 
which it crushes under it, while the other clutches 
the coils of a great snake which bites it with wide- 
open jaws. Columns of twisted and fluted red 
marble are set on their backs, and columns of 
smooth white marble stand behind them; and they 
help to hold up the under arch of the square door- 
way, with its alternate layers of smooth red marble 
and carved white marble. 

And the two colours of Veronese marble, red and 
white, are repeated in bricks, in pavements, in 
castles, churches, palaces, and bridges; and at 
sunset the whole city seems to flush with ruddy 
light. After the lamps are lighted the colours are 
still visible. Square towers rise white and red 
above the houses, and everywhere there are tall 
archways which open upon lines of ruddy walls, or 
upon the gold blackness of a narrowing street. 

II 

In the Piazza Erbe there is a marble fountain of 



230 VERONA 

the time of Berengarius I.; a later statue, a little 
distracting, has been added to it, but its original 
design is the most simple and ample of any fountain 
I know. The basin is but slightly hollowed, and the 
water falling into it overflows upon a pavement that 
slopes outwards only just enough for the water to 
pour off it into a narrow rim around its edge, from 
which it is drained off on one side through an iron 
grating. The Tribuna, the other marble columns, 
the column with the lion of St. Mark, set there when 
Verona became tributary to Venice, stand about it 
in the Piazza ; and all over the ground white umbrel- 
las rise like a wood of tall mushrooms, covering the 
stalls of fruit and vegetables, each umbrella set 
solidly into its wooden box, upon which it stands 
furled at night like a great unlighted altar candle. 
The Piazza Erbe is the most individual square that 
I knovv ; hardly two houses are of the same century, 
and each has its own personal quality. There is 
one house eight stories high ; an ancient carved pillar 
stands in front of it; but it is mean, discoloured, the 
plaster blackened, the green shutters peeled and 
stained ; it is but two windows in breadth, and under 
almost every window there is a fragment of carved 
stone under the rusty iron balcony. The frescoes 
in the Casa Mazzanti, Can Grande's house, where 
Dante was a guest, are not yet all gone from the 
walls; poor people look out between them from 
every window, and look on a square hardly changed 
except for its tram line. 



VERONA 231 

In the Via Mazzanti, at the back of the Piazza 
Erbe, the house of the Scalas is covered with balconies 
in long lines, with others set irregularly; and a tall 
outer staircase goes up along the wall to the third 
stor}^ A few fine windows are still left, and below, 
clamped by long trails of iron hanging from the walls 
on each side of the narrow street, is a marble well, 
its eight sides covered with florid effective carving 
coloured to many shades by age and dust. On the 
walls of the house, beside the Volto Barbaro, a pas- 
sage which goes under fragments of old brick-work, 
looking out from the midst of modern building, there 
is an inscription, typical of many which may be 
seen in Verona: ''Mastino I della Scala, eletto 
Podesta nel 1260, Capitano del Popolo nel 1261, 
cadde ucciso a tradimento li 17 Ottobre 1277, presso 
questo volto da cio detto Barbaro." ("Mastino I 
della Scala, elected Podestk in 1260, Captain of the 
People in 1261, fell, treacherously slain, the 17th 
October, 1277, near this arch, thence called Bar- 
barous.") 

The Piazza was once the Forum, when Verona 
was Roman; now it is the fruit-market, and the 
tram runs backwards and forwards through it all 
day long, down the street of the lions, and past the 
house where they tell you Juliet lived. I was walk- 
ing through it after dark, and I heard a thin tinkle 
of music coming out between half-closed shutters. 
Looking through them, I saw the waiter of the 
"Deposito di Birra," in his shirt-sleeves, whirled 



232 VERONA 

round in the arms of a customer who wore a hat and 
was smoking a Virginia. A moment later the land- 
lady and a woman who had been sitting at one of 
the tables waltzed past the window. The guitar 
tinkled, the dancers laughed, stopped, and went 
back to the tables at which they sat or waited. 



Ill 



When I try to call up Verona, it is always the 
cypresses of the Giardino Giusti, and the tall terraces 
which their tops almost reach, that com.e first to 
mind. They are among the oldest cypresses in 
Europe, and among the tallest. I remember a bronze 
label on one incredibly wrinkled, dry, wizened, but 
still living bark, attesting it to have stood there four 
hundred years. The lean, ancient things stood as 
straight as pillars ; the whole slender stem seemed 
to sway down with every breath of wind, as I 
looked down on them from the height from which 
one sees across Verona to the Apennines. A 
cypress never looks young, and these, when one 
saw only the sombre green fur of their foliage, 
looked no older than any cypresses in any Turkish 
graveyard. To pass under them, and look close, was 
to see how like is the work of time, working by cen- 
turies upon the vegetable life of trees, to the work 
of time on the little animal lifetime of men. 

And then, as I think again of Verona, I see the 
church porch at the end of the street to which I 



VERONA 233 

came back every day, vSant' Anastasia, with its ribbed 
brick-work and the marble arch of the doonvay, and 
the fresco of the lunette. The bronze gates of San 
Zeno, each with its twenty-four reliefs, in the literal 
twelfth-century manner; the plain arches of the 
Roman bridge, and the wing-like Ghibelline battle- 
ments of Can Grande's bridge of the fourteenth 
century, with its inner galleries; a glimpse of old 
tall houses going right down into the river, as one 
sees them in Canaletto's pictures of Verona, done 
before the embankment straightened and spoiled it ; 
and then the lizard which I saw chnging to the wall 
of the hotel as I looked out of the window, and the 
inch-long snake which lay asleep by the side of the 
pavement: these, by I know not what unconscious 
choice of the memory, come back before my eyes, 
and help to station Verona. And, as vividly as 
anything there, I see the old water -seller who sat 
just aside from the Via Nuova, her copper-topped 
table of green wood with its pattern of brass nails, 
made to fit between the two short pillars of red 
marble with tops of white marble which stood at the 
entrance of the alley ; the bottles with brass stoppers 
which held some coloured liquid, the large copper can 
which held the water, and the vast copper bowl with 
water for washing the glasses. 

IV 

The Via Nuova is a narrow street which leads 



234 VERONA 

from the Piazza Erbe to the Piazza Vittorio Eman- 
uele ; it is a street of shops, closed at both ends to 
traffic, Hke the Sierpes at Seville, and, hke that, it is 
the evening promenade, or the beginning of a prome- 
nade which expands into that immense square which 
contains the Arena in one corner, leaving enough 
space over for the Municipio, the old Guard-house, 
and the mediaeval gateway of the Viscontis, besides 
a palace, cafes, shops, around no more than its outer 
edges. Beside the Arena the oldest things in Verona 
are new, and look already passing into decay. When 
Dante walked in it, it was a ruin, and since that 
century it has suffered little except at the hands of 
the restorers. It was built for cruel use, not for 
beauty; and there is a sternness in its aspect which 
would suit ill with any not serious or deadly sport. 
But now, browned, defaced, the whole skeleton of 
its walls left naked, one ruinous fragment of an 
outer wall still standing, unsupported and in all the 
disarray of age, it has that beauty of use, order, and 
strength which we have learned to see in the un- 
adorned and very simple building of the Romans, 
almost wherever two stones are left on one another 
and not yet cast down. Seen at night, with a purple 
sunset facing it across the gate of the Viscontis, and 
a tragic moon breaking through clouds, in a circle of 
white light, behind and above the great curve of its 
wall, it has another, romantic, almost Gothic, aspect, 
like that of those ruins of the Middle Ages which we 
begin to tire of, as being, like Swiss scenery, too 



VERONA 235 

picturesque, too splendidly arranged for effect. 
But a quieting of the clouds brings it back to its 
austerity. 

In the evenings the band plays in the Piazza, and 
the chairs of the cafes spread right across the broad 
pavement, and the people walk slowly up and down, 
coming from the Via Nuova, passing by the Arena, 
and going nearly up to the old gateway. I sat 
there with great content, thinking of other city 
squares where I had sat watching the people from 
a chair set on the pavement outside a cafe, and I 
wondered whether in even the great square of St. 
Mark's, where I should be in a few evenings from 
then, I should find more to remember, in what my 
eyes rested on, or a more adventurous point of 
flight for dreams. 

Autumn, 1903. 



BOLOGNA 



237 



BOLOGNA 

This sad and learned town, which I have seen 
only under a thin, continuous rain which made its 
streets of arcades seem a matter of course, revealed 
itself to me with a certain severe charm, a little 
fantastic also, fascinating rather the mind than 
the senses. Coming from Naples, I suddenly felt 
the North. In the bedroom of my hotel, where I 
heard the rain fall, outside my door, on the little 
open balcony over the central court, I remembered 
that for a month I had been sleeping where I could 
look from my bed and see nothing but sky and sea, 
both seeming to be equally far below me, in the 
hollow of a great plain. Walking in these covered 
streets, I saw only Northern faces hurrying past me ; 
students with their black-hooded mackintoshes, 
like the hooded cloak of Faust on the stage ; women 
with covered heads, their faces distressed because 
of the rain; farmers, gross as their cattle, who might 
have been coming to an English market. The sun 
had gone out, and all the bright colour seemed to 
have faded from the world. 

But, perhaps a little from the force of that very 
contrast, the browns and greys of Bologna seemed to 

239 



240 BOLOGNA 

me to have a singular and a very personal beauty. 
The crinkled brown of the unfinished front of S. 
Petronio, the dull brown brick-work of the two 
towers, the reddish-brown of S. Domenico, in its 
desolate square; all the many-shaded grey of colon- 
nades, of the University, of the courts seen through 
open doorways, under their arches, seemed to com- 
pose themselves to suit the whole picture of a town 
shut in upon itself since the Middle Ages, and still 
keeping so much of the Middle Ages within its walls. 
I found something bewildering in these unending 
churches, church within church, as in the sevenfold 
Santo Stefano, with their irregular architecture, 
their strange, primitive frescoes, their many carvings, 
tombs of saints and kings, their crypts cumbered with 
pious relics, eighth-century fonts, ninth-century sar- 
cophagi, their cloisters, two-storied, and now over- 
grown with grass. Wherever I went in Bologna I 
came upon something mediaeval: a church, a pillar, 
a public building, the Podestk dwindling away under 
the portico of Vignola into cafes and shops; and, 
more typical, because more fantastic than anything 
else, the two leaning towers, serving no purpose, not 
in themselves beautiful, but, like most of the caprices 
of the Middle Ages, lasting, a lasting wonder, a riddle 
without an answer, a sort of gigantic joke, stupe- 
fying as the jokes of Rabelais. 

In the picture gallery, among many indifferent 
pictures and some admirable ones, showing histori- 
cally the whole course of Bolognese art, there is a 



BOLOGNA 241 

roomful of Francias, from the formal, hard early 
manner of the worker in niello to the gentle and 
severe mastery of the later work. Francia shows 
me something of Bologna, in these intent, instructed 
faces, to whom life has always been a closed thing, 
shut in upon by walls, whose meditation has never 
been soft, or luxurious, or a flower of the sunlight, 
whose dreams have never been of very distant hori- 
zons. There is no mystery in his pictures, always 
the serious joy or the grave sorrow of unimpassioned 
people; and I have seen in the streets just those 
oval, placid women's faces, conscious of the day 
and the hour. His colour is clear, definite, but with- 
out splendour, or that shade which is the shadow of 
intense light. Like Bologna, he appeals rather to 
the mind than to the senses, and chiefly to a mind 
whose chief concerns are with those hundred and 
thirty churches, those twenty monasteries, which 
the city holds within its walls. 

But the most profound impression which I received 
in this old, sad, learned town, the slumber of whose 
colonnades is disturbed, after all not unsympathet- 
ically, by the boisterous youth, eternally renewed, 
century after century, of students, was the impression 
which I received from the Museo Civico. I was the 
only visitor that inclement day, and I congratulated 
myself on being safe from interruption. But gradu- 
ally, as I moved from room to room in that silence, 
amongst all those spoils of Etruscan and Italic 
sepulchres, the weight of so much, so ancient, and 
19 



242 BOLOGNA 

so forgotten death began to weigh upon me. I 
moved from room to room, and still I found myself 
among earthly bones, in which all the violence of a 
life which had come to an end so many centuries ago 
seemed still a-gasp in those mouths without lips, 
those sockets without eyes, those long, knotted, 
fieshless fingers. And by their side, in case after 
case, were all the little household things which those 
very hands, perhaps, had carried thoughtlessly; the 
hairpins of dead women, their earrings, their bronze 
mirrors, delicately worked, which had shown, per- 
haps, those very faces to themselves when they 
were yet flesh. I went into other rooms, but beside 
the instruments of music, their metal rusted, their 
strings slack and broken, I was pursued by the 
thought of the hands that had lifted them, the 
fingers that had sounded their notes. I turned to 
the coins, the medals; and there, in these delicately 
incised heads, Cellini's or John of Bologna's, I could 
see only that they were the portraits of dead men 
and women, and that the pride of life which had per- 
petuated them was after all only another glory 
which had gone down into the dust, ridiculously de- 
spoiled by death. Why was it, what unexpected, 
too convincing logic in these silent things, in the 
particular place where I saw them, the particular 
mood which I brought to the seeing of them? I 
cannot quite account for it, but never in any other 
museum (those mortuaries of civilisation laid out 
as a perpetual chapelle ardente for our amusement) 



BOLOGNA 243 

had I felt so acutely the pathos of transitory things 
not suffered to die; many separate houses, which 
had each been a home, turned into a public show; 
never had I felt such an odour of death, not even in 
Pompeii. 

Going a little hurriedly into the open air, I met a 
band of students who passed me with a joyous un- 
concern, untouched by the gathered trouble of the 
past or by any sense of sadness in the covered streets 
which echoed under their feet. Their audacious 
modemness, their confident youth, came to me with 
a singular relief, and, heedless of most things as 
they seemed just then to be, I remembered the not 
less confident motto of their university: "Bononia 
docet." 

Spring, 1897. 



BERGAMO AND LORENZO LOTTO 



245 



BERGAMO AND LORENZO LOTTO 

All around Bergamo one sees the landscape back- 
grounds of early Italian pictures: on one side the 
mountains, and, stretching out to the mountains or 
to the sky, wide flat plains, set with short trees like 
bushes, and with square patches of cultivated ground, 
a green level space ending on the sky in a mist. 
Here and there a little hill, like an abrupt rock, 
rises out of the plain. And the colours, as evening 
comes on, are the colours of a Luini fresco, greens 
and reddish browns, mingled just as they are on the 
plaster. Looking upwards from the Citta Bassa, 
the Cittk Alta rises out of the plain, almost suddenly, 
up a green hill; you see the long deep wall of the 
ramparts, lined along the top with walnut trees; 
above, tiers of white, flat, brown-roofed, many- 
windowed houses, like a Spanish, or Eastern, city; 
here and there a tower, a spire, a dome, or an arch. 
Roads climb the hillsides in terraces, and you see 
their straight lines turning abruptly, as they go 
higher. The houses are large and solid, and as you 
walk through the climbing streets you see, over 
your head, the roofs almost meet across the little 
gaps of sky. Now and again the streets broaden into 

247 



248 BERGAMO AND LORENZO LOTTO 

a square of many angles. The Piazza Garibaldi 
has at one end Scamozzi's unfinished palace, its 
three uncompanioned statues standing against the 
sky ; and at the other end, where the square of simple 
flat houses narrows, the Gothic Palazzo Vecchio, 
with its arcades, through which one sees the twelfth- 
century front of Santa Maria Maggiore, and a part 
of the over- decorated Capella Colleoni, like a casket 
of turned ivory, with one angle and the steps of the 
Cathedral. At the side there is a pillared staircase, 
roofed with rough red tiles, which goes up by abrupt 
stories of house-tops to a square tower, with I know 
not what romantic charm in its aspect. There is a 
florid monument to Garibaldi in the midst of the 
square, but the beautiful arches of the Palazzo Vec- 
chio end the space, opening to let the sight through 
upon pillars, curved stone steps, and the gateway of 
the lions. 

In the lower town, people go briskly about their 
business, and there is a continual coming and going 
of diligences from the country, and of trams trotting 
from the railway station to the funicular railway 
which takes you to the higher town. There are 
broad squares, with stalls of books and fruit in them, 
and low buildings like dilapidated almshouses, 
intersected by narrow streets, which form a kind of 
ciU between the two squares. The tram trots under 
a deep alley of chestnuts, and you seem at every 
point to be at the edge of the country. The fu- 
nicular railway goes up through trees and among 



BERGAMO AND LORENZO LOTTO 249 

houses, and sets you down not far from the wooded 
ramparts, which go all round the higher town, broad 
and dusty promenades which at certain points re- 
mind one of the Kalemegdan at Belgrade. 

Coming downwards from the higher town, by a 
road which goes under the Porta Sant' Agostino, 
just below the ruined Gothic church, now a barrack, 
which stands on one of the highest heights, you go 
through an alley of acacias to the Accademia Car- 
rara, in which three picture galleries are united, 
one of them containing the pictures left to his birth- 
place by Giovanni Morelli. Here and throughout 
Bergamo, in seven different churches, you are con- 
tinually meeting with Lorenzo Lottos. All through 
the Citta Alta there are churches, some of them 
locked, and most of them but poorly cared for, 
with frescoes left to peel off the walls and altar- 
pieces half concealed by the gilt frippery of religion. 
In the Cathedral there is a splendid little Madonna, 
which Morelli thought was a Bellini, but which Mr. 
Berenson tells us is a Bissolo: it is hidden away in 
a dark frame, like a wooden box, at the back of the 
high altar. But above all there are Lottos. In 
the Accademia there is the *' Betrothal of St. Cather- 
ine," in which conscious figures stand and lean as if 
they were set there for some gracious or elegantly 
sentimental effect, the dignity of fine peasant 
models smoothed out into prettiness. In the por- 
trait of a woman against a sky in which a gold moon 
breaks through storm-clouds, there is a sumptuous 



250 BERGAMO AND LORENZO LOTTO 

quality of real charm in this face,which has character 
as well as prettiness, a face like an Ingres, with rich 
detail of rings and chains and pearls in necklace and 
fillet, and an elaborate red hat with cunningly ren- 
dered gold bows. In Santo Spirito there is a 
Madonna with saints, shoals of angels adrift on 
tinted and tufted clouds, in which the prettiness has 
no fineness; it is wholly done for effect, and the 
quality of the paint has the quality of the feeling, 
with a kind of actual acidity in its colour. In the 
queer, shut-up church of San Michele al Pozzo 
Bianco, there are some frescoes in which we see 
much of what is best in this feminine and never 
quite sincere painter. They are half hidden by 
gilt altar-pieces, and parts of them have been 
plastered over, but there is real charm, with an 
unusual simplicity, in these quiet green landscapes, 
in which Mary and the Child ride on a little 
shaggy donkey, and Joseph toils uphill carrying a 
pack on his back. There is the marriage of the 
Virgin, and her birth, done with broad washes of 
plain colour, and a charming figure of the Virgin, 
at her marriage, in white, with green leaves in her 
hair. But in San Bernardino in Pignolo there is a 
Madonna (obscured behind great red hangings and 
gilt gewgaws) painted in that smooth way, with that 
forced, self-conscious elegance of attitude, which 
gives its air of insincerity to so much of Lotto's 
work. And again, in San Bartolomeo, there is a 
throned Madonna, with sprawling angels above and 



BERGAMO AND LORENZO LOTTO 251 

crowded saints below, which, full as it is of effec- 
tive ability, of ready design, of undistinguished but 
telling colour, has the rhetorical quality of the the- 
atre, with the insincerity of every form of rhetoric. 
To see the Lotto one goes into the choir, behind 
the high altar; and, turning away dissatisfied from 
what clamoured for one's attention in the altar-piece, 
I looked, at first carelessly, and then as closely as 
the dim light would let me, at the intarsia work of 
the stalls, done by Fra Damiano in 1520, four years 
after the picture. Here, in this supple and vigorous 
work in wood, I saw what could be done by a fine 
artist in the handling of somewhat intractable 
material. The work was broad or minute at will; 
with splendid masses and division of colour in some 
designs which seemed to represent the Deluge, sharp, 
clear, firmly outlined in the patterns of streets and 
houses; full of rich colour in the setting of wood 
against wood, and at times almost as delicate as a 
Japanese design. There was the head of John the 
Baptist laid on a stone slab, which was like a drawing 
of Daumier. And, in the whole composition of the 
design, with its two ovals set on each side like mir- 
rors for the central horror, there was perfect bal- 
ance. The work throughout was firm, fine, 
delicately elaborated; every stall was a picture, 
complete in itself, and with a quality of sincerity 
which I had looked for in vain in the altar-piece of 
Lotto. The contrast set me thinking. I am not 
judging Lotto by all that is known of him, by his 



252 BERGAMO AND LORENZO LOTTO 

best portraits, like that portrait of an old man in 
the Brera, but Lotto as we see him at Bergamo, 
a painter of religious pictures in which he aims 
at rendering a certain kind of reality. And the 
criticism of Fra Damiano upon his contemporary 
the famous painter seemed to me the criticism of a 
thing, comparatively humble in itself, but in itself 
wholly satisfying, upon the failure of a more con- 
spicuous endeavour, which has made its own place 
in art, to satisfy certain primary demands which 
one may logically make upon it. 

1903. 



BRESCIA AND ROMANINO 



253 



BRESCIA AND ROMANINO 

Brescia is broad and leisurely, with arcades and 
squares, churches and palaces ; and the Middle Ages 
and the Renaissance and the Resorgimento live 
there comfortably together. There was hard fighting 
here in 1849, and there are monuments to those who 
fell in the streets. And these modern statues and 
reliefs of men with muskets are seen side by side with 
Roman columns of the first century, early Christian 
basilicas, palaces of the twelfth century, elaborate 
Renaissance fagades, and the numberless white mar- 
ble fountains, of different ages and of many admi- 
rable designs, which bring the sound of water into 
these clean and not crowded streets. Everywhere 
fine doorways open into patios, with green grass, 
trees, pillars, and a fountain ; it might be Spain, only 
there are no rejas, none of the beautiful iron gates 
which in Spain shut off the patio from the street. 
And one comes constantly upon fine old buildings, 
turned now to humble uses, but kept with a certain 
care and cleanliness. Wine-presses stand in the 
side streets, and one hears the grapes splashing and 
cracking, as a dirty man with purple legs dances in 
the barrel. And there are wine-screws out of which 

255 



256 BRESCIA AND ROMANINO 

one sees men taking bowls of crushed red skins, like 
a kind of purple peat. 

The people of Brecsia go quietly about their 
streets, and on Sunday evenings sit down by the 
pavement while the band plays outside the cafes 
under the arcades. One might be at Venice, at 
Florian's or the Quadri, but there is no St. Mark's 
and, indeed, no Piazza. The street, at that part 
of the Corso, is very broad, and from half -past eight 
to ten the trams stop, little toy trams which trot 
in an antiquated way, each with its one lean horse. 
A policeman in a tall hat and frock-coat, holding a 
tasselled cane, sets up two heavily- weighted notice 
boards at each end of a given length of the tram 
line. On these boards the words " Passagio pei soli 
pedoni" are painted in writing characters on three 
music staves in the treble clef. At ten o'clock the 
tram, which has been waiting, begins to trot again, 
and the people go home. 

The people (except for a strange breed of dwarfs, 
chiefly women, who are not deformed, but no more 
than half -size) remind me a little of Venice. There 
are the same small creatures, women and girls, who 
wear black shawls or black lace mantillas over their 
heads, and pass by twos and threes, quietly, with 
watchful eyes, always with beautiful hair, which in 
the very old women turns to a kind of crisp white 
wool. There is no model of Romanino or of Moretto 
whom I did not see in the streets, and I saw also 
some smaller and more piquant faces, delicately 



BRESCIA AND ROMANINO 257 

featured, which I do not find in the work of the two 
painters of Brescia. 

People go to Brescia for the sake of Moretto and 
of Romanino, who make up a Httle Brescian school 
of their own and whose work is chiefly to be seen 
there. Walter Pater, with something more than 
sympathy, has interpreted all that is best in the 
work of this ''Rubens in Italy" and his companion 
in the paper called "Art Notes in North Italy." 
Going to Brescia and to Bergamo, it was with an 
aroused curiosity that I went through the galleries 
and had the doors of many churches unlocked for 
me. I never tried so hard to like the work of any 
painter as I have tried to like the work of Moretto, 
nor failed so completely. Everything of Moretto 
has vigour, yet the vigour rarely reaches fineness; 
his skill in the use of colour ends before the touch of 
illumination has come; his design is never, even at 
its best, free from a certain conventional correctness. 
He has been praised for his "subdued silvery tone" 
and for a Venetian richness of colouring. Neither 
in his richness nor in his severity does he show the 
instinctive qualities of a great colourist ; he is always 
capable, never subtle, never really distinguished. 
What has been called ideality in him is a sentiment 
which, however sincere it may be in itself, is unable 
to express itself, except very rarely, in a sincere way. 
He is the type of all that is skilful, telling, and ener- 
getic ; his aim is serious, and his capacity considerable, 
but he remains, a little out in the cold, between the 



258 BRESCIA AND ROMANINO 

great painters and the painters who, without being 
great, have carried some individual charm to per- 
fection. He is no one's favourite painter. 

In the work of Romanino (who was born thirteen 
years before Moretto, in 1485, and who survived him 
eleven years) I find it more possible to be interested, 
and I am able to look on Romanino with a kind of 
respect which Moretto rarely exacts from me. In 
the Corpus Domini Chapel of San Giovanni there 
are frescoes by both painters, side by side, the 
younger man still obviously under the influence of 
the elder. But as one compares the works of the 
two men, how much more simple, downright, really 
seen and felt, are the Romaninos! They remind me 
at certain points of the work of Madox Brown; one 
picture in particular, of Christ in the house of the 
Pharisee, where the Magdalen kneels almost under 
the table, as she bends over to kiss the feet of 
Christ, with a natural movement of quaint awk- 
wardness. Moretto has painted the scene in the 
church of Santa Maria Calchera, less theatrically 
than usual, and with an almost literal copy of the 
queer attitude: the body arched over and the head 
drooping. I do not find much more than skill and 
a somewhat superficial simplicity in the well-known 
Romanino in that church, the ' ' St. Apollonius. " But 
in the church of San Francesco there is a ''Madonna 
and Saints " behind the high altar which shows us, 
certainly, all that Romanino can do. Seen from 
the doorway, it glows with a rich and sombre colour, 



BRESCIA AND ROMANINO 259 

as if wrought out of darkness; and the colour has 
sobriety, Hke the design, in which a form wholly 
traditional seems to come alive, with a character of 
its own. There is a Virgin with slightly sullen lips 
and eyes; there are fine kneeling figures below, in 
green and gold cloaks. Something of what is more 
earnest and personal in Romanino is seen in the 
" Supper at Emmaus " in the Palazzo Martinengo, 
with its sombre quality of paint, its directness of rep- 
resentation. And whenever he is seen in company 
with Moretto, as in that gallery and in the old Cathe- 
dral, where all the bravura of Moretto is heard 
clamouring, he impresses one by what is simple and 
sincere in his statement of things. Is it only by 
comparison? At least I have never felt so forbid- 
ding an aspect in any picture gallery as in that pic- 
ture gallery at Brescia, where Moretto and Romanino 
surround one with their hard, capable, and unlovely 
work. I find myself turning by preference to the 
Romaninos, but with little satisfaction. And for 
once I find a Raphael, which brings a certain relief 
and coolness to the eyes, as I turn to the small, 
minute, and really beautiful head of Christ wearing 
the crown of thorns, painted at Florence, but still 
under the influence of Perugino. There I saw a 
thing wholly achieved, not half way to accomplish- 
ment ; and I became all the more conscious of the 
very definite point at which Romanino had stopped. 



1903. 



ON A REMBRANDT IN MILAN 



261 



ON A REMBRANDT IN MILAN 

I HAD Spent an hour in the Brera, and I was a 
little weary of the beauty of consciously beautiful 
things. From the Lombard frescoes of the four- 
teenth century, down to Procaccini and Crispi, 
every Italian picture is an attempt to create 
beauty; beauty first and everything else after- 
wards. I remember that when I was in Spain it 
seemed to me as if only the Italians had realised 
how pictures should be painted. In Spain the 
dramatic sense has obscured the sense of beauty; 
there must be a story told spectacularly, with all 
the gestures of the emotion, and if beauty comes 
into it at all it comes as an ornament to a scene 
otherwise conceived. But after an hour in the 
Brera I begin to feel a certain monotony and a 
certain lifelessness in these beautiful persons, who 
seemed to have existed in the world only that 
they might be painted; in these scenes that 
had never happened except in a painter's studio; 
in all that was artificial from the beginning 
in these pictures painted for ornament. There is a 
Raphael which has a room to itself, like the Raphael 
at Dresden; the " Sposalizio," which the ofHcial 
catalogue, like the guide-books, honours with three 

263 



264 ON A REMBRANDT IN MILAN 

stars in the margin. It is an early picture, painted 
in the manner of Perugino; and it is painted with 
an already perfectly assured skill, an easy and justi- 
fied confidence which no difificulty, no sensitiveness 
before an ideal of something more than perfection, 
can abash. Looking into it closely, one sees there 
all that Perugino tried to do, done with decision; 
and all Perugino's quality, the quality which makes 
him interesting, gone. It is all polished away, im- 
proved clean out of existence. And there is the 
bright, smooth, finished thing, not a speck or crease 
upon it; almost as faultless and lifeless as if it had 
been made by a machine. It stands there alert 
as a champion, the typical Italian picture; and it 
says : ** A craftsman in the trade of beauty made me ; 
it is enough that I exist; bow down before me and 
own that I am worthy of three stars in the catalogue." 
Raphael challenges loudly; the others are more 
quiet, but all smile to themselves, as they await the 
eyes of the tourist, with the confidence of a beautiful 
woman awaiting the response of her mirror. And 
is there anywhere a more delicate orgy of loveliness 
than in this gallery of Italian pictures, which is like 
a perfumed garden, full of all manner of flowers? 
This spectacle, which begins, as you enter, with the 
gallant kinght, St. Martin, dividing his cloak with 
his sword for the beggar, is a gallant spectacle, full 
of all the world's finery, and jewels, and brave deaths 
and glorified Madonnas. It is all a very serious play, 
as serious as the woman's tragic comedy of her 



ON A REMBRANDT IN MILAN 265 

toilette ; and nothing in it moves one very much, not 
the languid grace with which St. Sebastian receives 
the arrows, nor Tintoretto's flaring lights and grey 
corpse in the long hall underground where St. Mark 
appears to the Venetians. When Mantegna paints 
the dead Christ with what Crowe and Calvalcaselle 
call ** disagreeable boldness," it is only, serious though 
it is, a game of perspective. By the side of the grey, 
startling thing there is the most placid of all Madon- 
nas, Mantegna's Virgin haloed with the heads of 
fat child-angels, and, beside Bellini's tragic and 
lovely Pieta, with the woman crying, there is the 
little comely brown peasant Virgin, who sits so 
primly against the strip of green background. All 
Luini's patrician saints are here, dressed as care- 
fully as if a woman had dressed them, with the 
white lines at their throats and wrists, their curled 
hair parted and falling in a few easy ripples down 
the neck. As flying angels carry the dead body of 
St. Catherine through the air, the same tress falls 
out from the gold tresses heaped together under her 
chin. An exquisite drawing, which has been wor- 
shipped as Leonardo's, and which may be his, in 
spite of a certain over-softness in it, shows us a 
Christ, full of mournfulness, and as beautiful as a 
woman. 

I had spent an hour among these colours and per- 
fumes, and it seemed as if my senses had begun to 
grow sleepy in their midst. All at once I came into 
a little room full of dark pictures, and in the middle 



266 ON A REMBRANDT IN MILAN 

of the room, on an easel, a living thing looked at 
me. It was the head of a woman, plump, blonde, 
with rich blood in her cheeks, and thin gold hair 
crimped over her forehead. Her red lips were pursed 
together, her quite round eyes wide open, and ex- 
pressing very little, except the quietly accepted fact 
of being alive. She was quite unconscious that I 
was looking at her, and, if she had noticed me, would 
have been indifferent to my opinion. An American 
lady who came into the room, and who saw me 
standing still and stupid in front of the picture, said 
kindly: "I have been in Amsterdam and it seems 
to me that I have seen her there. Is she not the 
blonde Saskia, the wife of Rembrandt?'* But I 
looked at my catalogue, and told her that it was 
Rembrandt's sister. 

And here, suddenly, I seemed to have found a 
thing which made all the rest of the pictures like 
an enchanting box of toys. Here was nature ac- 
cepted frankly; nothing asked of nature but to be 
herself. In all the others, even when nature was the 
foundation, there had been arrangement, transpo- 
sition, an aim at doing something with nature, at 
fitting it to a pattern or setting it to a tune. Life 
must be a motive for decoration, and beauty must 
be added, like a garment, to whatever natural charm 
life may seem to suggest by its existence. Here, 
it was life itself that grew up softly upon the canvas, 
without any pattern but what seemed the accident 
of nature (nature's truth that is) and without an 



ON A REMBRANDT IN MILAN 267 

added ornament except the mere truth of paint. 
The white Hnen about the neck, the collar embroid- 
ered with jewels, shone with an actual glitter as if 
the paint sparkled under the light. And this paint 
seemed to delight in its own beauty, as the sunlight 
does, when it makes and brightens the colours of 
the world. A new art, it seemed, had been dis- 
covered, by which things themselves, anything in 
itself, could become eternally interesting; an art 
which invented a whole new, infinitely various 
beauty, by the mere illumination of things truth- 
fully realised, in their precise accompaniment and 
subordination to life. 

1903. 



BY THE SAME WRITER 

Poems (Collected edition in two volumes). 1902. 

An Introduction to the Study of Browning. 
1886, 1906. 

Aubrey Beardsley. 1898, 1905. 

The Symbolist Movement in Literature. 
1899. 

Plays, Acting, and Music. 1903. 

Cities. 1903. 

Studies in Prose and Verse. 1904. 

A Book of Twenty Songs. 1905. 

Spiritual Adventures. 1905. 

The Fool of the World, and Other Poems. 
1906. 

Studies in Seven Arts. 1906. 

William Blake. 1907. 



263 



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